Evelyn Wu is the Commander of the colony ship Shennong — the first vessel of the Pioneer Fleet, the colonization counterpart to the Pathfinder Fleet. Both fleets were built from the same design lineage at Deimos on parallel tracks from the shipyard’s earliest construction phase. Pathfinder’s hulls cleared first; Pioneer’s — two to three times the mass, carrying colonists rather than survey crews — took longer.
In early 2103, Wu arrived at Ceres with Shennong and gave The Belt Times’ Chen Yifei the first public interview aboard the ship. Her crew complement of 180 supported a colonist and specialist manifest of just under 1,000 — agricultural engineers, hydroponics specialists, fabrication crews bound for Ganymede. She described the ship as “closer to a small township that happens to move.”
Wu broke the news on air that Pathfinder had reached Jovian space and was on course for Europa — the first public confirmation of the signal. She deferred the headline to Fleet Commander Rosalind Kovács: “Kovács earned that headline. I just happened to be the one carrying the relay when it came through.”