That last but of your comment is true. There are points of interest you can land at and you'll likely land right next to it, if not on a landing pad for it. These will also sometimes be handcrafted and have story elements attached.

Beyond that, yeah it's pretty empty. Honestly though, I think the planets are too full for nothing to be happening on them. There's so many facilities and outposts on planets you can find while exploring that it feels like there should be other things happening. We should be able to land at outposts from orbit, or choose to land somewhere isolated where it's mostly just empty, besides natural things.

The fact that there's no almost no activity in space despite all these outposts kills it for me. The space aspect is totally seperate from the rest of the game. Almost nothing ever happens in space and it never effects anything in the universe. There are pirates, but there should be shipping lines and cargo ships, as well as colony ships and things like that to steal from. There is the occasional handcrafted encounter like this, but it's never related to things going on around you, just randomly selected. They also never effect anything else outside that encounter.

The world just doesn't feel alive. Skyrim and Fallout tried to make the world feel real and lived in. It made sense how goods and people traveled around. Starfield doesn't even attempt this even in the main cities really. Everything is so static and boring.