In the next update (0.9.0-beta), the scanning, navigation and mining tasks will be fully automatable. You need a crew member assigned to each of these tasks to constantly find new asteroids, automatically navigate to the next asteroid and automatically mine it. This makes the game a lot more “idle”.
In the end, the goal of the game is to level up the crew members. The expeditions give you artifacts, which essentially are temporary buffs. They are useful to progress faster so sending crew members on expeditions is an important aspect of the game too. That’s one of the reasons why I’m adding more crew members.
One important detail is that if you do a task yourself, without assigning a crew member, no crew member gets the XP. So it’s always useful to assign a crew member to a task. The idea to start with one crew member and the player can’t take any action is interesting. I’ll have to think about this but it might make a lot of sense to change that. Thanks for the detailed feedback!