As Artemis II lifted off last week, sending NASA astronauts on a 10-day swing around the moon, another cosmic venture was preparing to launch: Space Junk.
It bills itself as the first magazine to look at the culture of space travel — not just astronauts and prospective space tourists, but meteor hunters, stargazing communities and sci-fi fans.
The timing seems right. The first issue will come out on April 29, shortly after the Artemis crew’s scheduled return from its exploratory mission. China is also aiming for a moon landing, as is the next Artemis mission, and the billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are also reaching for the stars with their rocket companies.
“It does feel like we’re in a second space race,” Jack Mills, a founding editor of Space Junk, said by phone from his home in London. A publication on all things space “was there for the taking,” he added. “It’s a magazine that doesn’t exist — and should.”
Space Junk is not a science magazine like Air & Space from the Smithsonian but rather a kind of art book, published annually. It’s more interested in aesthetics and emotional experiences than, say, recent findings in quantum mechanics.
“We wanted it to be accessible,” Jo Evendon, Space Junk’s co-founder and visual director, said. “We’re not scientists. It’s meant to be very approachable.”
Mr. Mills, 39, is the former editor of the British youth culture bible Dazed and the current editor of the men’s fashion biannual Another Man. Ms. Evendon, 37, was the photo director at Dazed and now works for Art Partner, an agency for artists and photographers in New York City. To help with the Space Junk’s art direction, Mr. Mills and Ms. Evendon brought in the New York creative studio Special Offer, which won a Grammy last year for Charli XCX’s “Brat” recording package.
Although the magazine’s founders are devoted to the future, they still like print. “Just being the ages we are and our backgrounds, I want to hold something and keep it,” Ms. Evendon said. “I can’t keep a website. I want to feel it in my hands.” With a newsstand price of $35, Space Junk is the kind of thing you might find at bookstores and magazine shops that carry Kinfolk, Man About Town and The Rake.
Mr. Mills said that Space Junk had given him an opportunity to step away from the trend-chasing of his day job. For the first issue, he commissioned the autofiction writer Chris Kraus to interview two astronauts with the European Space Agency. Ms. Evendon sent the photographer Chris Lensz to Armenia to document an abandoned Soviet-era telescope, which “looks like it’s from a sci-fi set,” she said.
For the cover story, the Magnum photographer Trent Parke shot the remains of America’s first space station, Skylab, which crash-landed in Western Australia in the late 1970s. His close-ups of the rusting debris have an odd beauty.
Mr. Mills and Ms. Evendon consider Space Junk a passion project. They largely funded the production cost themselves, though the fashion label Bottega Veneta advertised in the pilot issue, underwriting some of the expense.
In mining a subject that’s been historically reserved for scientists and engineers, Mr. Mills feels he has discovered “magazine riches.”
“Space is a red herring in the issue,” he said. “It’s not about the act of space travel. It’s that feeling of the unknown, of the future, that engages me.”
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
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