This reminds me so much of the setup for a game I'm working on called Otherspace, the gameplay format is different, more like if Captain Forever was a sandbox game, but the setup is really similar. The whole being a convict working off their sentence through a mining company, but my super special resource is instead called Luciferin and it's like the secret to FTL communication but only because it unlocks psionic abilities in the AI adjutants that were commonly used by military vessels. I kind of do jump away from that setup pretty quickly though because there is like a whole entire catastrophe that inadvertently frees you, but it was cool to see something made by someone with a similar imagination.
Overall I'm a fan of the gameplay loop, the resource gathering and movement feel really good. I did struggle a bit with the controls though, in that my hands got pretty confused moving between ctrl and space and I kept accidentally ploughing into asteroids. I think a fun way to alleviate this could be if you added an auto-dampener upgrade with a toggle or something similar. Additionally I think your game would pair absolutely brilliantly with gamepad support, I think the controls would feel very nice in that format. Some sort of aid to depth perception would be nice if you could figure that out too. Overall though the gameplay was really fun, the atmosphere was on point, and I really enjoyed the like minded story telling.