[quote="wmarshal"] Is there a niche for a system that supports campaigns with semi-realistic space travel/logistics and economics AND plenty of aliens and mystical “wuuwuu”? [/quote]
Rubber-forehead aliens and mystical wuuwuu are associated more with the science fantasy genre, which tends to care more about drama than about how its settings' technologies work; wheras fiction that leans heavily on detailing the capabilities and limitations of specific technologies is almost by definition "hard" SF, and hard SF avoids handwaving like the plague.
Which isn't to say you couldn't have an SF game with both wuuwuu mysticism and hard logistics - just that there's not much written fiction that includes both, so the "I wanna make a game that plays like the books I love" motivation for designing such a game is missing, so it's less likely that a game designer has already been inspired to make such a game.
Your best option might be to import some wuuwuu mysticism into an existing hard SF game. Traveller's pretty easy to mod, in my experience; maybe you could... I dunno, import Mage: The Awakening's system of spheres as abilities for player characters, or something?
[quote="wmarshal"] Stars Without Number has more crunch, but is lacking in the department of aliens. [/quote] Eh? It has rules for making new alien races, and the sector generation rules have a fairly high chance of generating alien-inhabited worlds, and the entire game is built on the premise that you can import old D&D adventures and reskin the monsters as alien critters of various sorts... Is it that you want some predefined alien cultures that fit into the setting in a well-defined way, rather than rules for rolling your own?
[quote="wmarshal"] SWN does have low level psychics, and a separate book for space magic, but for some reason the psychic powers and magic feel off to me. (Might be the bizarre spell names/effects and the tool box nature of the material.) [/quote]
For a while now I've been considering running a Stars Without Number campaign with magic, but using only the Arcanist class from the SWN Deluxe Edition core book and the eldrich spells from ACKS's Heroic Fantasy Handbook, instead of any of the content from Stars Without Number's own magic sourcebook. My idea is to flavour magic as an ancient practice barely changed since the days of pre-modern alchemists and astrologers, and which has been preserved and passed on only by secretive cults - differentiating it from the more mainstream-studied-and-publically-acknowledged psionic disciplines.
I've no idea how well that idea would work in practice, but there's something about using insense and chalk and ritual to conjure cacodemon spawn in the engine room of a tramp freighter starship that I find fascinating.