Search the boards for something space ... there were definitely a couple of good thread I saw on this.

If you are a programmer type, then you could go down the road of having the spaceship stay stationary and the world moves around it. The speed of the entities moving will be a factor of their distance from the ship. The benefit is you can easily create a basically infinite universe.

The stars will probably be made up of a sky dome that is black with stars ... these are for the very distant stars that don't move. Combine this with particles that will whiz by the ship depending on the velocity - these are the near stars the ship is passing. Maybe even some very simple sprite entities for medium distance stars the shipping is moving by but no so fast as to make sense to use particles. With particles you can easily create a smear type afect for when they hit a worm hole!!!

These are just directions to go in ... my game isn't a space game but we have the inifinite world and starting out we just had a solid block sky and it was very obvious to us a space sim could be esily done with this approach - and we wouldn't be pulling our hair trying to make our terrain seamlessly match up either!!!

Good Luck.