~Culture

Space Junk: Taking the Cosmos Back from the Guys in Cowboy Hats

When Bezos went to space in a cowboy hat, someone had to laugh. Space Junk magazine (256 pages, Bottega Veneta ad) is making the case that the cosmos belongs to everyone. Even the people who can’t afford a SpaceX hoodie.

Prodigy

Prodigy

— 5 min read
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Photo by Jazmin Quaynor (unsplash), Edited/Rendered by gpt-image-2

The first time I saw a photo of Jeff Bezos in his cowboy hat, back from his eleven-minute joyride past the Kármán line, I thought: this is what happens when a man who could end childhood hunger decides to cosplay as Yosemite Sam instead. I wasn't alone. Somewhere, a designer already sketched a magazine cover.

The magazine is called Space Junk, and according to Dazed, it sets out to wrestle space culture “back from the hands of selfish billionaires.” Here’s the first joke, and the magazine didn’t write it: Space Junk runs 256 pages, carries a Bottega Veneta ad in its pilot issue, and its art direction comes from the studio behind the Grammy-winning packaging for Charli XCX’s “Brat.” Its co-founder, Jack Mills, edited Dazed’s print edition. A glossy art object, then, with the posture of a zine, aimed at the men who own the rockets. Underneath the gloss it carries something stranger: the idea the cosmos belongs to everyone, including the people who can’t afford a SpaceX hoodie.

I want to talk about why a magazine matters when the men at the top own the rockets.

The Aesthetic Coup

For about a decade, we've outsourced our collective imagination of space to three guys with too much money and one shared vibe board. Musk gives us Mars colonies rendered in PowerPoint beige. Bezos gives us phallic capsules and the unblinking confidence of a man nobody has ever told no. Branson gives us, well, Branson, which is its own kind of pollution.

A 2023 Concordia master's thesis by Samuel Garland reads these billionaire ventures as a "technological myth": expansion sold as humanity's path to progress, even survival. The selling is the point. It's theater. Expensive, smoke-machine theater where the audience buys the ticket and the actor takes the bow.

Space Junk responds the way the best zines always have, by refusing to take the staging seriously. Instead of awe, it offers a side-eye. Instead of reverence for the engineering, it asks why the engineering keeps producing the same square-jawed founder photo. Where corporate space imagery insists on the sublime, the magazine insists on the ridiculous, which, when you're staring at a man in a cowboy hat who floated above Texas for the length of a sitcom, is the more honest response.

This is the aesthetic coup. You can puncture a myth with nerve, a point of view, and the willingness to laugh first. No rocket required.

Why Humor Is the Right Weapon

There's a temptation, when discussing billionaire space tourism, to reach for the grave register. The grave register is earned. Scientific American has argued privately funded spaceflight is "geared to perpetuate inequities in space and on Earth." The Boston Review pointed out the same trio markets cosmic optimism to the public while quietly "reaping big private profits." A viral petition's creator, quoted in Byline Times, called it "a slap in the face."

All true. All also, for the average reader, fatiguing. There's a limit to how many times an op-ed can slap you in the face before you go numb.

Humor sneaks past the numbness. It does what statistics can't: remind you the emperor is naked and, worse, weirdly proud of his abs. Space Junk embeds that humor in the object itself, in the puns and the side-eye and the flat refusal to kneel. The magazine's posture stays human-scale, something you hold in two hands. Theirs needs a launch complex. Guess which one sits closer to human life?

Stand-up comics and improv troupes have known this forever. The Progressive flagged corporate media's billionaire-space-tourism coverage as its "Junk Food News" of the year. When the news itself becomes junk food, mockery is a multivitamin.

The Literal Trash Above Us

Here's where the metaphor gets a body. Right now, a staggering amount of garbage orbits Earth. Harvard Magazine counts more than 25,000 pieces of tracked orbital debris circling the planet at 17,000 miles per hour. Scientific American estimates collisions cost satellite operators between $86 million and $103 million a year. The Science History Institute helpfully notes the junk up there includes dead satellites, spent rocket stages, and "stuff that astronauts left behind, such as cameras and poop."

Cameras and poop. The sublime frontier, ladies and gentlemen.

The interesting part is who's cleaning it up. Not the billionaires. Europe leads on debris removal, with missions like ClearSpace-1, run by a Swiss startup, and the UK-led RemoveDEBRIS satellite. Small, public-minded, often academic. The people who broke the orbit and the people fixing it are, conspicuously, not the same people.

The magazine takes its name from this mess, and the double meaning is the whole point. The trash above us and the trash discourse around us are the same problem. Both come from a few people treating a shared resource like a personal sandbox.

History Echoes, Faintly Snickering

Cultural movements built on photocopied paper have a quiet track record. Samizdat passed banned literature through the Soviet Union. Punk zines gave a generation permission to be loud and broke. Riot grrrl turned shame into a weekly print run. The xeroxed page has always been the format of people who couldn't buy the megaphone.

Space Junk descends from that tradition even as it shares a shelf with Kinfolk and The Rake. It inherits the posture rather than the price tag: irreverence, puns, a refusal to stay solemn about power. And it suggests the next frontier of cultural resistance won't be only digital. Some of it might be deliberately, stubbornly analog. A printed object in a world of algorithmic feeds makes its own quiet statement: this took hands, this took time, this can't be A/B tested into oblivion.

If you can mock the rocket, you can imagine a world where the rocket isn't the only story. If you can imagine that world, you can build small pieces of it. A magazine. A community. A different question to ask at dinner.

The billionaires still own the rockets. They do not, it turns out, own the sky. The sky belongs to everyone who looks up: the kid in her bedroom with a glue stick, deciding the future matters too much to leave to the guys in the cowboy hats.

Somewhere, that kid is already laughing. The future, slowly, learns to laugh back.

References

Models used: gpt-4.1, claude-opus-4-7, claude-haiku-4-5-20251001, gpt-image-2

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