Can you lose your Pre-Order ship

If you set your ship down right next to a crashed one (so you can easily find your ship again), then you can claim ownership of the crashed ship, scrap all of its parts for valuable elements, and walk over and reclaim ownership of your original ship. You won't lose anything.

The game seems to do a good job of remembering the state of things (e.g. which boxes have been opened, which houseplants have been farmed, etc.) even very far away from one's current position, but I don't know what its limits are, and I would be very surprised if it remembers that info after the game has been shut off.

Terrifying Update

I recently made my first multi-million unit ship purchase inside a space station. My old ship was still sitting where it had been when the purchase was complete, and as I'd not been able to fit all of my inventory into the new ship, I decided to use the above tactic to go grab the rest. When I reclaimed my old ship, grabbed the remaining items, and turned around ... my new ship was gone. My heart stopped for several beats until I realized that the game had moved it to a different landing pad. (It had been parked behind my old ship and now it was to the right of my old ship.)

So, I don't know how safe it is in general to immediately reclaim your old ship after you buy a new one. (But I still regularly use this approach on crashed ships.)

The only 2 ways I've tried so far don't work.

1. Walking, you can walk all the way to the end of the runway (right word?), but there's a wall at the end
2. Surfing, if you stand on a ship once it's landed, it wont take off with you on top, and it appears when the ships are flying they don't have a hitbox.

Only other thing I can think of is to try and glitch out, but I've not come across anywhere to do that yet.