On May 28, 2026, a rocket operated by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin exploded at its launch site in Florida. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the damages likely ran over $100 million, with untold impact on the local environment and wildlife, as well as setting back a plan to build a lunar base by several months. “Very rough day,” posted Bezos in the aftermath. 

A few weeks before that “very rough day”, though, we got to see what it looks like when everything goes right, as Nasa’s crewed Artemis II mission successfully launched and beamed back hundreds of images from the far side of the moon. One particularly striking image from Artemis II showed astronaut Christina Koch – the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit – looking back at our green and blue planet from the windows of the Orion spacecraft, her hair floating in front of the lens. “First braids to leave Earth orbit (unconfirmed),” she joked on Instagram, where commenters celebrated the pioneering human achievement.

These two images – an over-the-shoulder snapshot of a human who’s travelled further from Earth than ever before, and a private company’s rocket blowing up without even getting off the ground – pretty much sum up the duality of space exploration as it exists in our collective imagination. And the new magazine Space Junk embraces both of these poles. “People use space as an excuse to look at the future, and as a prop to view [our] society in a more positive light,” says editor-in-chief Jack Mills. “The flipside is that all these billionaires do that as well, using it as an excuse to flex their influence. We’re looking at that darkness as well as the positivity.”

The “red thread” that runs throughout the debut (aptly-named) ‘Pilot Issue’, though, is the sense of adventure, curiosity, and the unknown that permeates every facet of the culture of space travel. The issue features schoolkids in the Welsh Valleys who help NASA to track humanity-threatening asteroids and adrenaline junkies surfing down active, Mars-like volcanoes in Nicaragua; there’s an interview with Charlie Duke, one of the four living humans to have walked on the moon, and a conversation between two prospective astronauts and Chris Hadfield, a former commander of the International Space Station. From Western Australia, there are photos of the wreckage from Skylab – America’s first space station – which was scavenged by a church museum when it crashed back down to Earth, by design, in the late 70s.

The design of the issue itself, led by Special Offer, also leans into the multifaceted nature of space culture, aiming to capture its tensions. “We were interested in how things might print out on a spaceship, from some strange retro-futuristic printer,” says Special Offer’s Savannah Ioakimedes. “The clichés associated with space-inspired design can quickly feel predictable, so we wanted to create something otherworldly that still felt minimalist and elegant.” On the other hand, exposed binding and printing irregularities speak to the “junk” side of the equation.

Human achievements aren’t limited to space, of course, and many critics of space travel understandably question whether the industry’s money, time, and resources wouldn’t be better used to support more down-to-earth causes, like rescuing our burning planet. But for Space Junk, ironically, space travel in and of itself is a “bit of a red herring”, to be taken with a grain of salt. 

Take the conversation between Hadfield and the astronauts-in-training, for example, which dispels the myth of the “overview effect” – a moment where an astronaut sees the Earth rise from space for the first time and supposedly transforms into a different person. “Hadfield said that if you’re curious about the natural world, you’ll be just as blown away as you would be seeing Niagara Falls, or walking through a forest, or having a child,” says Mills. “It’s slightly hyperbolic, going into space to rediscover yourself, or discover the limits of your appreciation. It’s more about your inherent desire and drive for change, and believing in what humans can do in the future.” And presumably, we don’t need to explain why people need a healthy dose of faith in human nature right now.

Below, we speak to Jack Mills and visual director Jo Evendon about the inaugural issue of Space Junk and snatching the image of space from the hands of profit-seeking billionaires.

How did you end up so obsessed with space in the first place?

Jack Mills: My dad was the crime reporter at a local newspaper in Brighton, where I grew up. I used to hear about all the cordoned-off sites he would visit and the cases he helped uncover; he was one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene of the Thatcher IRA bombing at the Grand Hotel. In a way, I think we’re both drawn to the dark and light forces that influence people's behaviour, their obsessive tendencies, ideas of self, the ambitions and emotions that get people out of bed every morning and push them further than they thought they could go.

I think Covid was terrible for the majority of reasons, but a positive that did come out of it was a sci-fi movement saying, ‘Let’s dismantle the systems that we thought were kind of working.’ And space is really about that. We’re using space as an excuse to feel good about the future again.

Jo Evendon: My dad was a sci-fi guy, so I grew up with an appreciation for sci-fi, and weird things and aliens. From early years, he told me aliens built the pyramids, so I grew up in that weird and wonderful way of thinking. But I went to an exhibition at the Design Museum in 2019, called Moving to Mars, and that’s when I first started thinking about my interest in space and speculative futures in an editorial context. 

How does Space Junk compare to other science, tech, or cultural media? What did you want to do differently?

Jack Mills: I think the fact we’re not scared of the darkness gives the whole magazine a bit more gravity, so to speak. It’s also just an excuse to do loads of puns, to be honest.

Jo Evendon: Space is a heavy subject, and the average place where you’re learning about it can be very scientific and a lot to take in. Jack and I have said from the get-go that we’re not scientists. So it’s an accessible, palatable way of learning about space, with artwork and photography that feels like it’s jumping off the page.

A lot of the imagery crosses the line between real research and fantasy, as well as science and art, like the kids surfing down volcanoes.

Jack Mills: There was this guy I found that was surfing into one of the largest meteor impact craters, and he’s this lone drifter, going at insane speeds, alone, and finding all these space rocks. In a way, he’s created his own hybrid sport. Then I found these kids that were surfing down an active volcano in Nicaragua, a really barren, Mars-like environment. It turns out it’s like a national sport there, which is quite funny. And it also became a crazy visualisation of the strange, celestial sport we were thinking about.

Jo Evendon: Michael James Fox photographed that. He’s a skateboarder, so it made sense. He did multiple trips, to get the fastest, most dramatic shots.

Jack Mills: One picture looks like a human rocket, and they naturally have to wear these bright hazmat suits, almost NASA orange. It’s high-stakes, the extreme sport, [although] the volcano obviously isn’t technically a crater.

With companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX dominating space discourse, optimism about the future has become weirdly right-wing-coded. Why do you think that is?

Jack Mills: The first space race was led by centralised governments; it was the Russian cosmonauts versus the NASA astronauts, and that played into the Cold War propaganda machine. Now, it’s very much a privatised, individualised version of this. You’ve got Bezos and Musk sacking half of NASA, but also being like, ‘How can I look more impressive to my investors? Let’s just fire about 15 more rockets up next year than we did last year.’ We could also look at the way the International Space Station is being decommissioned and potentially privatised, which is an extraordinary story. I love looking at the darkness of that straight on, without any agenda, and we have the freedom to do that [because] we’re not involved in the space game. We’re completely independent journalists. We’re not involved in the politics of it at all.

Do you think Space Junk can help rethink who gets to dream about space?

Jack Mills: Obviously, there is an optimism at the very core of the magazine – it’s about inspiring creative responses and obsessions. I hope that it’s a good opportunity to get some kids that are really into space into the conversation, get some nerds in, and talk about Syd Mead and the really good side of space travel – exploration, and the joy of the unknown, not knowing what’s ahead of us.

Jo Evendon: It’s such a juxtaposition with the news which is just fucking men bombing people and threatening humanity – all for what? – and then you’re looking at us going to the moon. Soon, we’re going to move there, to eventually create a base, then move on to Mars. Then, what’s past Mars? What’s past our solar system? What’s past our galaxy? People live within such stupid boundaries that are based on this Earth and this Earth only, and create such negativity from that. Throughout the last two and a bit years, we’ve been working on Space Junk with the weight of the world getting heavier and heavier. It’s nice to have this escapism… and it’s not even just escapism. It’s real. You can genuinely lean into this limitless future.

Space Junk is available here now.