can there be multiplayer?
As far as I know this is planned. But it will probably still take a while. (A few years?)
Unless it means being able to fly around as an avatar and being able to tell your friend "Hey, look, come see this" and zoom down together and just be 2 giants looking down upon a planet, kinda like Google Earth VR if it was for desktop and had multiplayer, then this would just mean yet another space game where you fly around doing your own things. Count me out, Elite and No Man's Sky, Infinity: Battlescape, etc. are enough.
EDIT: My point being that space feels too big for a full multiplayer game because all that space goes to waste if you use it on a multiplayer game where you have to be in the same couple of kilometers to see each other's ships. The avatar that grows when you zoom out of a galaxy idea is to keep things feeling multi, if you know what I mean, so you can be at the cosmic horizon and see someone else provided you have the clearest screen in the world, so you aren't isolated my massive reaches of utter nothingness. Yes, it isn't much of a game but it emphasizes the multiplayer more. Maybe just have this as an extra mode if you're that desperate to join Elite and NMS on the multiplayer space opera bandwagon?