Space pirates are a type of stock character from science fiction. A take on the traditional seafaring pirates of history or the fictional air pirates of the 19th century, space pirates travel through outer space. Where traditional pirates target sailing ships, space pirates serve a similar role in sci-fi media: they capture and plunder spacecraft for cargo, loot and occasionally steal spacecraft, and kill or enslave the crewmembers and passengers.

The archetype evolved from the air pirate trope popular from the turn of the century until the 1920s. By the 1930s, space pirates were recurring villains in the Buck Rogers comic strip. However, their dress and speech may vary; it may correspond to the particular author's vision of the future, rather than their seafaring precursors. On the other hand, space pirates may be modeled after stereotypical sea pirates. They may be humans who originate from Earth or a specific race of aliens. Space pirates are common in space opera and soft science fiction, including within Japanese anime narratives and erotica.

In 1925, Hugo Gernsback's science fiction novel, Ralph 124C 41+ featured a space pirate as a character. The book centers around a love story between the protagonist, Ralph and a civil scientist, with a space pirate from Mars also "vying for her affections," part of the scientific speculation of the novel itself. Around the same time, author Henry Edward Warner, who composed his poems which were assembled in a 1929 book, Songs of the Craft, began writing various poems, including some about the "so-called space pirate." Six years later, in November 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum's novella, The Red Peri appeared in the science fiction magazine Astounding Stories. In the novel, the primary character, Peri, is a space pirate who has a base on Pluto. The novel was praised for imaginative backgrounds, although its romance was considered to be at the level of "shopgirl pulps," and writing which leaves "much to be desired," David Bowman's helmetless spacewalk in 2001: A Space Odyssey was inspired by Frank Keene's escape from the pirate base in the novel. Following this, in 1940, Jack Williamson's story Hindsight, a space opera, included a character named Astrarch. He was a space pirate and dictator of the Solar System, with the story focusing on an attempt by those on Earth to break free of his shackles.

The 1950s brought with it a blossoming of science fiction, including a focus on computers, space travel, and outer space in general. This included Murray Leinster's novel, The Pirates of Zan, which included a "space pirate much like his typical maritime counterpart in appearance." Alfred Bester said that it wasn't until Astounding Stories was rescued from an "abyss of space pirates, mad scientists" that he was able to go back to the publication.

By 1969 there was a turn to outer space on television, with heroes changing from cowboys to "Space-Pirate-Cowboys." One year after Turner patented his game, Stanislaw Lem published The Cyberiad, a book in which two constructors named Trurl and Klapaucius are "captured by a space pirate who pillages and hoards information." In order to be freed from him, they build something which interprets "the movement of air molecules as information" and the pirate underestimates how much information is within the movement, and he is buried in a "mountain of paper filled with useless information." Later in the 1960s, six episodes of the sixth season of the live-action television show Doctor Who featured a gang of space pirates, with the galaxy being described as spanned by a game between those who enforce the law and pirates like Dervish and Caven who will "apparently stop at nothing to continue their lucrative racket."

In the 1977 film Star Wars, the character Han Solo, who helps Luke Skywalker on his journey, is often described as a space pirate, being a smuggler and a rogue who will flee conflict despite his bravado. The same year, Leiji Matsumoto created the iconic manga series Space Pirate Captain Harlock. The character of Captain Harlock is a "mysterious space pirate captain" fighting to protect the world, which some saw as an homage to the samurai, and the stories would inspire many other characters in the years to come. Some said that Captain Harlock "set the template for anime’s "space pirate" archetype." In 1978, Daniel C. Dennett proposed a philosophical question where a viewer would have to answer three questions correctly in order to "save the world from a space pirate." The following year, the first book in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series featured space pirates. In the story, Ford Prefect, a main character, explains that the trade routes between the center of the galaxy and outer areas were disrupted in the past by space pirates, but that they were "wiped out in the Dordellis wars," with freighter ships equipped with huge space ships thereafter. Adams also wrote a tale of space piracy in his 1978 Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet, where pirates move a hollow planet through space.

The 1980s also brought Captain Zargon, a space pirate, and a representation of "space-age warfare," part of the Action Man toy series released by Hasbro. 1984 brought various stories including space pirates. John Steakley's novel Armor, an homage to Starship Troopers, a novel by Robert A. Heinlein published in 1959, introduces a protagonist named Felix. In the 1990 sequel, Vampires$, Jack Crow, an antihero is introduced, who is a " legendary space pirate" which may have been the "source for Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow." The same year that Armor was published, the film, The Ice Pirates was first shown in U.S. theaters. Apart from the film being noteworthy for its cheeky, obviously cut-rate production values, mid-eighties "color-blind casting", sexual frankness, and near-deliberately slack "sitcom" direction, the film included space pirates. TCM described the film as about two space pirates being dragooned "into helping a princess find her father." The first video game in the long-running Metroid series was released in 1986. Its alien space pirate antagonists, the lizard-like Kraid and the draconic Ridley, as well as their leader, the biocomputer Mother Brain, would go on to feature in numerous future games as the nemeses of protagonist Samus Aran. The same year, Lois McMaster Bujold's novel The Warrior's Apprentice was published. The book's main character, Miles Vorkosigan, is an antihero, aristocrat, soldier, and space pirate, beginning in this novel and continuing in the Vorkosigan Saga series.

The 1990s brought various space pirates. The 1994 game Super Metroid continued the space pirate theme, having Samus chase after Ridley and his pirates. In addition, the Stephen R. Donaldson novels, This Day All Gods Die (1997) and Forbidden Knowledge (1992) include a space pirate by the name of Nick Succorso. This portrayal was criticized by the fact that Succorso may have raped the protagonist, Morn, in the latter novel, depending on how one defines the term, rape.