Earlier this summer, Jameel Janjua became the first Canadian to fly a commercial spacecraft. Janjua, a decorated fighter pilot, is now a co-pilot with Virgin Galactic, taking very wealthy passengers to space for US$450,000 a pop.

Courtney Shea interviewed Janjua for Maclean’s about his lifelong passion for space travel and his recent adventures 45,000 feet above the Earth. Janjua grew up in Calgary, did his bachelor’s degree at the Royal Military College, earned a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, then served in the U.K.’s Royal Air Force in Afghanistan and Libya before joining the pilot team at Virgin Galactic.

Janjua tells Shea that his recent experience flying into space with a co-pilot and two passengers was overwhelming. Here’s how he described it: “The speed is mind-blowing. You feel the velocity deep in your gut. But what stands out are the views once we’re in space. Pictures don’t do the scenery justice. We’ve all seen blue and green before, but up there, it’s something entirely different.”

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

Kyler Zeleny grew up on his parents’ farm in Mundare, Alberta, a sleepy, 900-person farming community east of Edmonton. “It was peaceful, but people thought that to be a success, you had to leave,” he recalls. So at 18, he jumped ship. But years later, on a visit home, he noticed that Mundare was slowly slipping into decay—and decided to document it. The resulting book, titled Bury Me in the Back 40, is a sensitive account of Mundare’s past and present. Here’s a look inside.

Ned Moran used to rack up 12 to 14 hours of screen time every day. But after a summer of excessive phone use, Moran ditched their smartphone. “I realized that I’d built my identity around this portable glass brick—outside of it, I had no idea who I was,” they write in an essay for Maclean’s. So they bought a $100 flip phone on Amazon, and it changed everything.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

Everyone knows that owning a home in one of Canada’s marquee cities is now largely the purview of millionaires. In Toronto, a typical home goes for nearly $1.1 million, while the price of admission in Greater Vancouver is even higher at $1.2 million (and a house in West Vancouver has the vertigo-inducing sticker shock of $2.6 million). The good news is that we managed to find 10 cities on the rise where you can still buy a house for under $700,000. Read our September issue cover story now.

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