Is there a way to change the zoom distance that this occurs at?
The various zooming/icon fade/etc options are in the gameplay.constants in two spots, it looks like. There's a few lines at the top (though that may actually be for the pre-set zoom keys, I don't know), and a VisibilityDistanceData section towards the middle.
Each planet entity also has a line for minZoomDistanceMult, but I'm not sure what that could be.
Haven't actually messed with zooming myself, but something for you to try tweaking