SPACE JUNK Pilot Explores Space Through Culture Lens

Something fascinating is happening when space stops being just science and starts becoming culture. That’s where SPACE JUNK lands. It’s not trying to explain the cosmos in clean, textbook language. It’s trying to capture how a generation actually feels about it. Messy, curious, skeptical, a little bit obsessed.

Edited by Jack Mills, the debut issue, Pilot, reads less like a magazine and more like a time capsule from the near future. It pulls together photography, fashion, and speculative thinking to blur the line between what space is and what we imagine it could be. You’re not just reading about rockets and missions. You’re stepping into the mythology we’ve built around them.

“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.”

What makes it click is the mix of voices. You’ve got a conversation between astronaut Charlie Duke and writer Chris Kraus, which alone tells you this isn’t sticking to one lane. It’s science colliding with philosophy, lived experience bumping into abstract thought. The kind of pairing that makes you stop and rethink what “space exploration” even means.

Visually, it leans hard into identity and mood. Contributors like Claire Barrow, Ellie Grace Cumming, and Trent Parke bring a raw, almost tactile quality to the idea of space. Under the visual direction of Jo Evendon, it feels less like looking up at the stars and more like staring into a mirror of who we are right now.

At 266 pages, designed by Special Offer, Pilot doesn’t rush. It sits with its ideas. It questions how future societies might actually work beyond Earth, not just technologically, but culturally. Who gets to go? What we bring with us. What we leave behind.

At its core, SPACE JUNK is trying to document something slippery. Not space itself, but our relationship to it. The hope, the hype, the fiction we keep telling ourselves. It’s a record of a generation looking outward and, at the same time, turning inward.