Interesting little tidbit. I have no idea how they are going to handle player death in the game, which obviously is going to be a factor since there are threats on the ground, but apparently if your ship is destroyed while you are in space, the equivalent of an escape pod brings you to the nearest inhabited planet, where you essentially have to rebuild your ship from scratch. (well, using the pod as something to build off of) Any enhancements you made to your vessel will have been destroyed, and you won't even be able to get off the ground without constructing some crude engines, in all likelihood.
If I had theorize, I think that maybe there is both a ship inventory, a cargo container basically, and a personal inventory. If you die while on your ship, you lose everything in your cargo, and if you die on the surface, you lose everything in your personal inventory. Just a guess.
So getting to the center of the universe isn't going to be as simple as clawing your way forward bit by bit with endless respawns. Biting off more than you can chew, and getting destroyed as a result, could actually set you back catastrophically, even force you to backtrack so you can reacquire resources on planets you've visited before, so your ship can be upgraded to its previous capabilities.