Captain Zoe Andersen May 2026

We caught up with her during a 36-hour layover at Arcturus Station, between a cargo haul to Titan and a passenger liner bound for the outer colonies. Andersen doesn’t look like a legacy pilot. She doesn’t wear a captain’s cap unless regulations require it, and her uniform jacket is often draped over her chair. She prefers a worn leather bomber jacket—her father’s, she notes.

“Look,” she says, standing up to head back to the docking bay. Her boots are scuffed. Her hair is a mess. “The black doesn’t care about your legacy. The black just is . My job is to get people from Point A to Point B without them turning into frozen meat popsicles. If I can do that while telling a bad joke and petting a tomato plant? I call that a win.” captain zoe andersen

When asked about it, she shrugs.

She laughs, but it’s true. Zoe Andersen started as a mechanic. She learned the smell of burning hydraulics before she learned how to trim a flight yoke. Her rise through the ranks of TransStellar Dynamics was less a meteoric rise and more a stubborn crawl through engine rooms and midnight cargo inspections. You cannot write about Captain Andersen without mentioning The Themis Incident . We caught up with her during a 36-hour

— Mira Solis, Deep Space Weekly