Zena Cardman

Zena Cardman came to spaceflight not from a cockpit but from the field and the seafloor. Born on October 26, 1987, and raised in Virginia, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Master of Science in Marine Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she trained as a geobiologist studying how microbes cycle carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur in some of the planet's most extreme places. Her research took her from Arctic and Antarctic expeditions to caves and deep-sea sediments, and even to the engine room of a brigantine, where she sailed as an assistant engineer with the Sea Education Association. At the time NASA came calling she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at Pennsylvania State University, investigating microbial life in subsurface environments. In June 2017 NASA named her to its 12-member astronaut class, informally nicknamed the "Turtles," and she reported for duty that August to begin two years of candidate training in ISS systems, robotics, spacewalking, and T-38 flight.

Cardman's road to orbit ran through one of the most closely watched crew shuffles in recent NASA history. She was first assigned to SpaceX Crew-9, but in 2024, when the agency decided the troubled Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test would return uncrewed, seats on the Dragon were needed to bring home Starliner's crew, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Cardman and crewmate Stephanie Wilson were removed from that flight so the return could happen. Rather than a career setback, the reassignment led to a bigger role: NASA named her commander of SpaceX Crew-11. On August 1, 2025, she launched aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavour alongside pilot Mike Fincke, JAXA's Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, joining the International Space Station as part of Expeditions 73 and 74. Commanding a Dragon on a first spaceflight is uncommon, and Cardman led the mission for 167 days before the crew returned earlier than planned: a medical event affecting a crewmate prompted NASA's first medical evacuation from the station, and the crew splashed down in the Pacific off the California coast on January 15, 2026.

That single expedition places Cardman among the newest generation of long-duration NASA fliers, with roughly 167 days and about 4,000 hours in space to her name. A first spacewalk she had been preparing for was scrubbed when the mission ended early, so she logged no EVAs on this flight. Her significance lies as much in her path as her ledger: a working scientist whose expertise in life at the edges of habitability speaks directly to the questions astrobiology asks about other worlds, and a commander who gained her assignment through the give-and-take of a crew rotation defined by Starliner's problems. An active astronaut in the prime of her career, she remains in NASA's corps, eligible for future assignments, and stands as a visible example of how field science and deep-sea engineering can be as valid a runway to command as the test-pilot track that shaped earlier generations.