I'm in the same boat as you after my fist vanilla play through, I went with space exploration and krastorio. I even built a base in the orbit of the first planet. But it is pretty longwinded. And it was also kind of boring/tedious/unenjoyable (for me) to ship all this resources with rockets between bases.

On my current run with krastorio only I am having a blast.

Also install all the quality of live mods. Squeak through especially. No more oh no I need to break this solar field partially down because I cannot leave any more.