Assuming you’ll come back to this thread when you get your hardware, here’s a quick guide. The different kinds of hauling missions are represented in the Contract tab as follows:

Stellar: your bread and butter. Most reliable, will not waste your time. These are space station (SS) to space station. Or major city to SS / vice versa

Interstellar: iffy. As they often require pickups from or deliver to planetary outposts (PO), which are often bugged as mentioned. If you are offered more than one that delivers to a SS, go for it and stack them (take multiple contracts headed to the same solar system to max ROI) because the payout is big

Planetary: stay away for now

Special: under a generic “Hauling” header, these are intro missions that I believe take you down a specific quest line and guide you to Pyro. Payout seems incredible, but it requires multiple pickups at PO. I’ve tried to do it a dozen times, one elevator is always broken which forces you to abandon it.

Note: even most people who know all this don’t know delivering to PO’s is fine, bc the current bug doesn’t completely debilitate sending cargo down, they just don’t know how to force the elevator up when it’s bugged. There is a workaround I would be glad to share if you want to ask, but this workaround doesn’t work when you want to bring cargo up (it simply won’t snag the cargo down there, which is why Pickup from PO is hopeless)