Novel where FTL causes a centrifuge to attract towards center

Question

Looking for a novel, who’s title I thought was ‘Barnard’s Star’, but the hits with this name didn’t seem to fit. The novel is about an expedition to a star (could still be Barnard’s).

Plot points I remember: The drive was some kind of FTL that caused time reversal, with the effects being that the crew became younger and what was is more striking to my memory, the physics got time reversed: The crew were strapped to a centrifuge, and when it spun during the flight, the astronauts were flung toward the axis causing some injuries (I seem to remember that someone’s knees banged against their face).

Once arriving, they landed on a habitable planet and various tensions arose between the crew. Some of it was caused by political tension (the crew was multinational), and some due to the rejuvenation that the crew had experienced. For example, the American astronaut in the crew was known in his youth to be a skirt chaser, but had mellowed in middle age, but I guess the hormones of youth messed him up again and he started an affair with an east European female astronaut.

A memorable confrontation was a fight where the “medical laser” was used. This laser could produce short but rare (say once every minute) bursts of powerful light, So the protagonist feinted by using an ordinary flashlight to spoof his (her?) adversary. The book must be at least 30 years old, and the bit with the centrifuge makes me think it was written after Kubrick/Clark popularized the concept, so 1970-1990ish.

Answer 1

This is a shot in the dark, but how about Barnard's Planet by John Boyd?

Captain Lee Ashby, USN, was ready to retire. He wanted no more adventures in his life, no more uncertainty. But he found himself taking command of the Vortex Rider, leading a crew whose makeup made no military or scientific sense, except as colonizers of a new planet- and they had now way of knowing whether the planet was already inhabited.

It doesn't look promising from the precis on the Goodreads site, but as user108131 points out in a comment there is a review on Amazon that mentions:

FTL travel ("retrograde Earth time," "reversing the spin of DNA," "electromagnetic bioplasma," "atomic nuclei counter-rotate (when traveling) at vast speeds,"

and this looks like it might be referring to the time reversal mentioned in the description.

I found this by doing an advanced search on the ISFDB for novels with Barnard in the title, and surprisingly this was the only English language novel the search found.