Starfield is an absolutely massive game, and one of the ways that it "limits" you from moving too quickly through the story-line missions & quests is via level-gating, where some enemies, quests, tasks or missions simply will not be doable and you'll get stuck until you reach a certain higher level.
This can be a little complicated because when talking about your level, that includes how powerful your ship is, how good your weapons are, whether you have the right skills unlocked (eg lock-picking!), and to increase all of these stats is a combination of spending your skill points in the right places, doing the challenges to unlock the training for skills, finding better weapons & armor, upgrading your ship or by obtaining a better one.
If you do get stuck in a particular scenario, normally near the end of a quest when you'll encounter the "boss", it is ok to grav-drive away and simple do other things until your character and ship and ready.
If you are stuck in a situation where you can't disengage or fast-travel away from and out of combat, you may have to roll back a save or two.
Thanks, Rob.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scalespeeder
Youtube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTGhcBU2SPZkE4NLraqTIog/join
Currently, Scalespeeder Gaming has 42,477 views for Starfield across 40 videos. Starfield has approximately 6 hours of watchable video on his channel, less than 0.33% of the total video content that Scalespeeder Gaming has uploaded to YouTube.
6