3d space ship movement tutorial?

You want splines. There are literally hundreds of pages on splines, but here's a spline editor that Matt McFarland ( who I think goes by Leper here, but I may be confusing two different people ) wrote for just this purpose :

http://www.shmup-dev.com/forum/index.php?topic=26.0

And Diablo's one here :

http://www.shmup-dev.com/forum/index.php&topic=589