Você está pensando no Gateway , primeiro livro em as séries Heechee por Frederik Pohl , que também foi a resposta para as perguntas Procurando romance de ficção científica li sobre a humanidade encontrar estação alienígena em órbita da Terra e Alguém pode identificar este livro sobre naves espaciais minúsculas e Livro do final dos anos 80 sobre uma estação espacial abandonada .
Na descrição Wikipedia :
In the main part of the series, the frontier has moved away from Venus after explorers discovered an asteroid orbiting perpendicular to the ecliptic plane, filled with cobalt blue tunnels, and hundreds of small Heechee spaceships. The asteroid, named Gateway by the discoverers, is occupied by the powerful nations of the world, who subsequently form the Gateway Corporation to administer the object.
By happenstance, one of the asteroid explorers enters a ship and hits a button, activating the vehicle and sending him on a thirty-day journey to another solar system. Upon his return, the Gateway Corporation decides to allow explorers (called Prospectors) to take trips on the mostly still-functioning ships. Prospectors who find valuable materials or make discoveries are rewarded with substantial bonuses. Ships on the asteroids come in three sizes and are defined as a "one", "three", or "five" based upon the number of passengers that they can (for the most part uncomfortably) carry. Not every vehicle returns and there are other great hazards to the explorers.
The novel Gateway was serialized in Galaxy beginning November 1976, with illustrations by Vincent DiFate, and was published as a book by St. Martin's Press in April 1977. It won four major awards as the year's best English-language speculative fiction or science fiction novel. Translations into French, German, Dutch, and Italian were all published during 1978 and 1979.
The Gateway novel focuses on the exploits of one of those explorers, Robinette Broadhead. Broadhead hits the jackpot by becoming the first person to return from a black hole's event horizon. In the sequel, Broadhead uses the money to fund further discoveries involving Heechee technology, locating a Heechee food factory that is capable of turning raw carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) from comets into edible food for an overpopulated Earth.