I’ve played a few SF games at that sort of power level with Classic Traveller and GURPS (mostly 3e & 4e). The first ever games of “Star Wars” that I played or ran were done with Classic Traveller, with some mild conversions to give a Star Wars “feel”. Very much inspired by Westerns and WW2 books/TV/movies and thrillers from the 60s and 70s and early 80s. I would still consider those games today for the sort of game you describe, though I’d check out one of the more recent Cepheus Engine derivatives of Traveller. Mongoose Traveller would be fine, as far as I can see (I’ve only read some of the latest rules) but I find CE stuff to be a bit terser, just as good in terms of content, often better edited, and cheaper.
I also found the West End Games D6 (aka SWD6) system to be excellent for this as well. While the original WEG stuff is out of print, I believe the system minus the background resurfaced as the D6 system (or something named like that). Hopefully another reader on r/rpg can help out here.
As far as source material and adventures and such like, all we did in the 80s before SWD6 arrived on the scene was to use Traveller (and later, some GURPS), make stuff up (and set it on ‘the frontier’ somewhere so we didn’t have to worry too much about ‘canon’.