Reviews

It was engaging and fun enough to finish it, but the story had too many holes and hard to believe jumps in reasoning.

I have two big problems: Number one is the secrecy aspect of it - I get why it was important for the plot. They needed to be alone and stranded to overcome adversity on their own and for the whole arctic exploration metaphor.

But it's impossible for me to believe, that 1: nobody would've tracked the ship leaving. Several Organizations track celestial objects, even hobby astronomers would've found an anomaly like that.
2: after they lost contact the engineers of the automated asteroid mining company wouldn't have said anything or tried to help (btw the deaths associated with that were pretty dumb as well)
3: the amount of people needed to keep that operation running and nothing leaking to anybody outside? come on.

Problem number two is that Suarez does not fully grasp the concept of delta-v, he's conflating orbital velocity, thrust, acceleration and actual delta-v into one, using whichever he needs in a given paragraph. This book wants to be hard sci-fi so bad, but you need to get the basics down. I can suspend my disbelief for a lot, but it is literally the title of the book.

But five rocket engines? Each of them had a vacuum thrust of more than 400,000 pounds. That was a lot of delta-v.

Engines don't have anything to do with it, you can have the same change in velocity with a small engine burning for hours as with a big engine in minutes.

Tighe had become so space-focused that he reflexively estimated the delta-v of the champagne cork.

I think he meant orbital velocity? It's related, but the object won't have any fuel or an engine, thus can't change it's velocity (which would be the 'delta').

Barely 5 percent of the Konstantin’s length, the Nicole Clarke was nonetheless twice the Konstantin’s mass. However, since only 412 meters per second of delta-v was needed to depart Ryugu for cislunar space on this date, one lone rocket engine and a single large fuel tank would suffice to propel it homeward.

Fuel amount will be more if there's more mass, so this is again misleading at best. I already mentioned that engines have nothing to do with it.

Due in part to its huge mass, the new robot tug required two methalox engines instead of one, and this time it consisted of twenty-four spherical tanks, with thirty-six smaller tanks in the gaps between—4,500 tons of water, ammonia, nitrogen, and iron-nickel-cobalt carbonyls in all. It was more than four times the size of the first return vessel. Additionally the return delta-v to depart for cislunar space this time around was 706 meters per second—almost double the previous tug’s acceleration.

It's not acceleration, like at all. It is the Integral of the acceleration over the time of the burn.