Hi,
it's still a mistery, why this happens to some people. I can't reproduce it. I would need to see the output of the program when it times out.
If you download a Version manually ( http://files.star-made.org/build ), you have to extract the zip into a folder called 'StarMade' which must be in the folder, where the Launcher is for it to work.
I hope, that I was able to help,
cheers
schema