What is the short version of the Death of a Spaceman mechanic?

It's permadeath, but the idea is that you pass on your belongings to your next of kin. And with Death of a Spaceman, the idea is that you can die so many times and basically be revived, but you've lost a lot of your equipment that you took out on that journey. And you can be revived and then you'll be damaged. It'd be similar to Luke losing a hand or Thor losing his eye kind of thing. Spoilers for people. Especially Luke losing his hand, that's a good spoiler. From there, you basically have your body adjusted and modified and you get older through the game. And it's more just looks, and I don't think it'll affect your reflexes right yet or anything like that, or stamina. But then there'll come a certain point in time where you basically have to create a new character, and your old character dies and passes on, and now you're playing your new character. And it won't have all the scars and be battle-worn, old and jaded like we are. It'll be the new young pups.

And just to assuage any fears, when you talk about losing items, you're talking about losing the items that you have physically on you at that time. The stuff in your bank or in your hangar or whatnot, those bequeath to your new character.

Correct. It is basically about your local inventory and what you take out on, let's say you die going and exploring a sun. Go explore the sun. Or go and explore, let's say, a jump point between Pyro and Stanton. If you die in there, then you're losing the equipment that you took on that journey. And we'll have to worry about, is it there for X amount of time? So if you revive and you hurry back there, it might be there. That's something that we would still need to work out, but the idea is that you lose that. And so you want to be careful about what you're doing. We want to create that sense of urgency of: I want to stay alive, I don't want to lose what I have.