can i upgrade spaceship on starting statonFollow

like title says.. im on black sun uprising mission and i keep getting pwnt bad is there anyway for me to upgrade my spaceship on the noobie station i dont want to leave til i finish all quests

i have the components from killing other ships on 2nd part of black sun quest the miner you have to disable just pops and pretty much stands there so if you dont disable him i noticed you can sit still and kill him indefinatly to gather items so i have tons of components just dont see a station to add them to my ship or whatever

I'm not positive about this, but if you use the tilde (~) on the terminal you use to launch I think you can access the "manage" button. Click on manage and you can replace your old parts for newer better ones...