Played Freelancer? Interesting.
This shows potential. And yes, Flash is horribly slow, but I've seen demos for this kind of thing made in Actionscript 3 that ran at 20 FPS without the horribly low framerate. If you can afford Adobe CS3 and to learn AS3, I highly recommend you look into it, because apparently they rewrote Actionscript from scratch to make it more efficient.
3D in Flash is something that's entirely overlooked, with so few attempts, let alone finished products. I like this demo just because you've even tried to go beyond two dimensions. :D