Still an alpha for sure. If you have the time and inclination for the download then the planet stuff is now worth a look if you have a ship. It’s nicer on the planets than Elite, and the ships are detailed and you get space-legs, but apart from that is very raw. Like @Bogusheadbox said, a big ol tech-demo.
As for actual gameplay, the transport missions are really simple and then haven’t started the economy side. The main tech problems seem to be them optimizing the networking stuff, but it’s not something I had a problem with (maybe I got lucky, dunno, it seems number of players connected to the server dependent) - so basically this stuff here is playable.