It is. The whole setting is garbage though. I hope the devs just throw it all in the trash and focus on making a salvage game with pleasant progression.
With just a light retheming these same mechanics could give a mulitpolar world of salvage companies / freelancers each progressing through these tech trees with far more pleasant sinks than the current game currencies have to offer.
Oh they should also trash the CorpBucks secondary currency, not least because it takes away another excuse for whatever the hell they are doing with the SpaceBucks.
I say so because I love :) Its already a fun game but could be oh so much better if they reworked the game economy.