Well the Space Phase is so unforgiving, frustrating, and sometimes downright perplexing that no child would ever wish to go through it yet alone be able to.
You start out with the possibility of 1-5 people instantly hating you and attacking... They are able to expand and get more powerful weapons faster then you and thus attack you some more with even more powerful weapons non-stop while you barely have something that qualifies as a BBGun!
Ohh Spore, how I love the! Silly Rabbit, Spore is for nobody!
I'm not sure, but this might be a result of your race's final allignment.
I played through to galactic stage twice, once as a militaristic race and once as a religious ("peaceful") race.
I played space stage from scratch with the militaristic race twice and both times I started off with 1 merchant race and 2 a-hole races who would get offended at me for going near their unmarked territory and these games quickly turned to freaking hell.
The pacifist race, on the other hand, got nearly nothing but friendly races, at most hard to please ones, none of the "you on territory - we smash" bastards. In this game I got to build up my weaponry via spice trade relatively peacefully (kept getting surreal financial demands, but they never attacked) till I was able to take on alliance enemies and sort of take on the Gorax (fighting them is annoying as hell even with the best weaponry).
Not that it makes the game much better. The difficulty just drops from surreal to annoying (on normal, anyway).