Short answers, pulled from the story.
Star Wars Galaxies offered ten species to choose from at creation including Human, Zabrak, Wookiee, Trandoshan, Rodian, Mon Calamari, Bothan, Sullustan, and Ithorian. Players could not change their species or gender after making that initial choice.
The intended retail release date for Star Wars Galaxies was the 15th of April 2003. The game was originally titled Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided when revealed on the 20th of December 2002.
Sony Online Entertainment implemented the New Game Enhancements in November 2005 which drastically altered ground combat mechanics to real-time action similar to first-person shooters. Players now aimed a targeting reticule and left-clicked to fire while gaining access to specials activated by the right mouse button or toolbar as they leveled up.
The final closure occurred on the 15th of December 2011 at 9:01 PM Pacific time when servers shut down and disconnected players from the game. Twelve servers had already closed permanently on the 15th of October 2009 after character creation was disabled on the 15th of September 2009.
The SWGEmu project founded in 2004 aims to recreate the Pre-Combat Upgrade version of Galaxies from scratch using open source server code called Core3. Volunteers can easily contribute to its development and any member can launch their own server for their community under the GNU Affero General Public License.