If you place a contact in space (in other words a ship) there are no animations available to be selected.
To recreate, simply place a space contact and then try to select an animation. The select dialogue box opens but there's nothing there to select. This happens both with Contacts and Legacy Contacts.
Yeah, I really wanted to use a scanning animation on some NPC's. It works fine in one of my existing missions, but I can't add it when creating a mission.
Seems like when the animations got split between space and ground, the space NPC's didn't get anything. Hope this is fixed soon.