Wow. After several short "training" sessions, I settled down to my first real campaign.
My first jump point, there's an alien race on the other side. My contact protocol works perfectly, and my survey ship withdraws so I can ponder.
One five-day interval later, the game crashes spectacularly. Worse yet, when I restart the game, it refuses to start. I guess the database managed to corrupt itself?
Sorry I don't have more details, but the message it's giving me now when I try to restart the game is:
"Error 91 generated by Aurora
Object variable or With block variable not set"
That sounds very generic, so I suspect it isn't very helpful.

Does this kind of thing happen often?