Jack Mills and Jo Evendon discovered a shared interest in space while working together at Dazed magazine. “We both had sci-fi parents,” explains Evendon, “and we collaborated on a story about young astronauts.” One giant leap later, Space Junk, a magazine traversing the culture of modern space travel, launches this month, with Mills as editor-in-chief and Evendon as visual director. Published annually by Year Zero, art direction is by Special Offer, the creatives behind Charli xcx’s Brat campaign.
A timely and welcome antidote to the cosmos-shaped vanity projects of billionaires, Space Junk’s first issue has interviews with a comet-chaser risking their life in the wilderness of northern China, and with trespassers roaming abandoned space stations in Russia, while the magazine talks to astronauts-in-training, and an ex-commander of the International Space Station fields questions from rookie space-hopefuls (including the grotesque reality of vomiting in a space suit).
Out of this world: these photos are of fragments of a spaceship that disintegrated over Western Australia in the 70s, captured by photographer Trent Parke, as feature in the first issue of Space Junk
“We’re in a second space race now,” Mills says, “albeit a more complicated and potentially privatised one than in the 60s.” He “always wanted a magazine to focus on one theme in an ambitious way. If you have that light-bulb moment, you have to be the one to do it.” Evendon agrees: “To think about this inexplicable horizon, way beyond our imagination, and to hear stories of people dedicating their lives to exploration and discovery is a joy.” instagram.com/spacejunk.mag
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