God damn it. Spin cancellation: you're doing it wrong. /o\
Physics does not exist in this dojo (only when they want it to).
Those big spinning boxes are cargo containers, they rotate for visual flair, but mostly to rotate a cargo box to the right position to be loaded or unloaded.
They've actually got a pretty neat unified cargo system in the game, with sizes and containers and such. The 'fidelity' is pretty rad; you could open up that crate, physically stuff it full of things in first person view (guns, boxes, people, etc), close it up and put it on the ship for transport. Or for the larger cargo ships use the UI to do mass loading/unloading.
They are making it pretty robust so you are actually physically shipping the stuff from A to B, making a lot of the thieving or space trucker gameplay a bit more immersive.