If anyone wants to look into this, I think there is a bug affecting the creation of the Svalbard Explorer when you enter the system.
It gets created at the system center (over the star) whihc means the 'pos' value for the ship creation code is being set to 'nil' or (more likely) the code isn't running properly so is returning a 'nil' value. I suspect this is where the bug is. It should be created somewhere in the system well outside of the quarantine ring.
Also the ship order is set to 'gate'. I have seen this happen before with created ships. I think this is a default setting for created ships which are not given a proper order when created.
That is a couple of areas for people to look at which might help.
Also I like that the moral of this story is "if all else fails, blow something up"!

Stupid code. Do what I want, not what I typed in!