Space Junk #1
240 x 320 mm, 256 pages
London, UK
Annual
Co-founders: Jack Mills & Jo Evendon
Editor-in-Chief: Jack Mills
Art director: Brent David Freaney
Co-founded by Jack Mills and Jo Evendon, who between them boast credentials at leading media companies and creative agencies such as Another Man, Dazed and Art Partner, new large-format annual Space Junk explores the culture of space travel beyond the privatised and billionaire-led space race. Positioned ‘at the margins of youth culture and space travel’, the pioneering publication brings together a new generation of cosmic research experts and enthusiasts spanning disciplines as expansive as space itself—from archeology, aerospace engineering and astrophysics, to stargazing, speculative fiction, and photography.
Open-bound, with its title cleverly nestled into the spine, this aptly named ‘Pilot Issue’ leads with a cover feature on the remnants of the United States’ inaugural space station Skylab—which disintegrated over Western Australia in 1979—captured by award-winning Australian photographer Trent Parke, and furnished with annotations by Charlie Fox. Elsewhere, American writer and critic Chris Kraus sits down with two young European Space Agency astronauts-in-training, Anthea Comellini and Rosemary Coogan, as they prepare for the literal and metaphorical launch of their careers; Emily Sandstrom revisits artists Rick Guidice and Don Davis’ visionary multi-media blueprints for life on Mars; Ralph Jeffreys, junior editor of The Fence, has an inspiring encounter with 11 year old ‘Comet Chasers’ in a South Wales primary school; and, in Morocco, Hajar Elkahlaoui documents the thriving meteorite black market. You’ll also find features which lean more explicitly into the publication’s title, with space archeologist Alice Gorman arguing that earth’s floating scrapyard might not be entirely negative and an Oxford collective planning the first major orbital clean-up job.
Plus, tune into ‘Space Jams’—original tracks inspired by NASA’s interstellar emissions, commissioned specifically for this issue.