First short night of coding left me with a project skeleton, a blank starfield, and a few audio assets downloaded and ready to go.
Based on the ideas I've got, the UI is going to be the trickiest part of this thing. For my last game, Robo-Ninja, I didn't use much of LibGDX's scene UI classes, but I think I'm going to need to this time to get finished in time. If they work well, and if I can get the skins stuff figured out, I might have a chance at finishing.
We'll see.
I've started a bitbucket repository for this (yes, bitbucket, not github. I prefer it for the free private repositories), at https://bitbucket.org/gauauu/lifeinspace so that you all can see my horrible code :)