Smith was disenchanted when he saw editor T. O'Conor Sloane's unauthorized changes in the story, most likely made to give equal length to each of the three parts it had been split into.

[1] The story was the first to use the term "tractor beam", a name and concept that has been adopted by many subsequent literary works of fiction and other media to the present day.

Stevens and a female passenger named Nadia Newton end up stranded in a large, wedge-shaped piece of the dismembered ship.

With the remains of the Forlorn Hope, Steve has everything he needs to construct an ultra-radio set capable of reaching the inner worlds and calling for help.

She goes out each day to gather plants and animals that they can eat, while Steve struggles to rebuild most of Earth's basic technology from the ground up.

He succeeds in building a power plant and recharging the accumulators, and has also completed the ultra-radio except for the high-power output tube, which requires platinum, which they don't have, and must also be sealed in a vacuum.

Now in space and getting power beamed from the station he built on Ganymede, Steve navigates toward a comet that is in the vicinity of Jupiter at the time, which he remembers contains platinum which he can use for the output tube.

The people manning the mirror ship are a strange type of humanoid: very tall, with barrel chests, and pale blue in color.

Their blood is a mixture of substances that don't freeze even at Titan's temperature, and so combustable that if they were to stand unprotected next to an earth human they would literally burst into flame.

Steve and Nadia gladly accept, doing what repairs they can on the Forlorn Hope, and continuing to build the power tube on the long voyage to Titan.

The story ends with the rebuilt Arcturus arriving on Mars only four hundred forty-six days, fifteen hours, eleven minutes, thirty-eight and seven-tenths seconds late.

"[2] E. F. Bleiler wrote that, despite the novel's one-time popularity, "The combination of a considerable amount of advanced scientific double-talk, women's magazine romance, and space battles does not succeed.