Story by Maddie Ellis
Photos by Isabel Stellato
On a trip to Paris in 1996, Jim Kitchen and his girlfriend, Susan, got engaged on the top of the Eiffel Tower. They reserved the church and named a date. All the boxes were checked. Except for one.
“I want to talk to you about a prenuptial agreement,” Jim told Susan a few weeks before the wedding. “But it has nothing to do with money.”
His terms were clear.
“If I ever get the chance to go to space, I’d love to have that opportunity,” he said. He asked that she agree not to prevent those plans.
Whatever, Susan thought. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, but good luck,” she responded.
Today, Jim is an entrepreneur, professor at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and father of two. He insists he is just an “ordinary guy.” The son of public school teachers in south Florida who grew up wanting to be an astronaut but decided he wasn’t smart enough. So he saw Earth from the ground instead, visiting all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations.
Then on March 31, 25 years after he married Susan, he held her to her promise. Jim was part of the 4th human flight of New Shepard, a rocket system from Blue Origin. From his window, he watched the horizon expand into the curvature of the planet — his latest view in a life defined by the spiritual pull of wanderlust.
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When Jim was in fourth grade, he learned his teacher was related to John Glenn, the third American man in space and the first to orbit the Earth. To him, astronauts represented the daring figures emerging victorious in the space race, the pinnacle of making one’s country proud. He carried around an Estes model rocket constantly.
“Astronauts were the heroes of my generation,” Jim said.
While growing up in Boca Raton, Jim saw the continental United States. His parents were public school teachers, and when June arrived, they would hit the road.
“They put the kids in the back of the wood-paneled station wagon and off we go from South Florida to Washington state,” he said.
While his friends were playing baseball or football in the street, Jim remembers sitting in the car’s rear-facing seat, and watching the country fly by, backward.
Traveling was normal for Jim. So as he started to think about college, he felt what many 18 years olds feel; he just wanted to get out of town. He went to UNC-Chapel Hill and took a class in entrepreneurship – the very class he teaches today.
One of his first projects was promoting low-orbit space trips in 1985. Jim’s goal was to sell enough trips so that he could go for free. Two of his friends just laughed.
“Kitch, how many Project Space Voyage trips did you sell this week?” his friends would taunt.
“Ha, ha,” Jim would say back, dryly.
Project Space Voyage aimed to launch its inaugural consumer space flight in 1992, according to a 1986 article from the Chicago Tribune,
Just a few weeks after the publication of that article, on Jan. 28, 1986, Jim was walking on campus when he overheard people talking about a disaster that occurred that day. The Challenger space shuttle had exploded 73 seconds after its launch, killing seven crew members aboard, including a teacher.
Project Space Voyage was over.
“The whole thing went silent,” Jim said. “And this was no longer viable.”
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After college, Jim stayed in Chapel Hill and opened SBT, which specialized in group tours of the Caribbean. Through opening his own travel company, he traveled more and more.
Calling on his childhood, he wanted to see as much as possible. But instead of racing across the United States from June to August, never staying anywhere particularly long, Jim wanted to take his time.
Maybe 10, maybe 15, years ago, he wondered how many countries there are in total.
He looked up at the map next to his desk that had been there since 1991, taking up much of the office wall. The map that hangs there today, dated by the label “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
He marked the places he’s been and found he had already visited half of his list of 193. He thought, “Has anyone ever gone to all of these?”
As Jim’s career flourished and his family grew, Jim started traveling in the spring and summer months for several weeks at a time, checking multiple countries off his list each time. He calls it “power traveling.” But it doesn’t consist of rushing through an itinerary.
Traveling is an experience of receiving “little nudges” that push him to go certain places or talk to certain people.
“It’s kind of a spiritual thing,” he said.
He experienced one of those “nudges” in Mozambique, when he approached Margarita, a woman who was working at a marketplace. She was selling bajias, a food made of fried batter, and feeding children on their way to school. She showed him how to make them.
“I always met with people like Margarita who told the story of a country through the context of something very ordinary, but was so meaningful to the heart and soul of that country,” Jim said.
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Susan and Jim have two children, Kenan, born in 1999 and Karsen, born in 2003.
His “power traveling” started when the kids were in elementary school, a time when “kids aren’t focused on anybody but themselves,” Susan said. While Jim was gone for weeks at a time, back home in Chapel Hill, the family would settle into a routine.
“All moms say that sometimes it’s easier when the other parent isn’t there, because then you’re completely in charge, you know, you run a fine oiled machine,” she said. “And so then, everything changes. It was an adjustment, both ways, and I was happy to have him here, but he was gone a long time.”
Jim always aimed to be present for the big events.
“My goal as a dad was to, if my kids ever said ‘Dad, will you get in the pool? Dad, will you play Monopoly? … Dad, will you dress up as a pirate?,’ was that I would never say no,” Jim said. “My goal was to be as present as I possibly could when I was there, and the key thing is when I was there.”
Three weeks became his limit for how long he could be away without intense homesickness setting in, like a kid away at camp.
“When you’re not there for everything, you kind of feel like maybe I’m missing something,” he said.
When Jim traveled, he brought a small, square suitcase, the kind you may see pilots rolling through an airport terminal. Before he would leave, Susan hid snacks and candy throughout that suitcase, inside hidden pockets, the case’s lining and between his few items of clothing and toiletries, for him to find piece by piece.
“He said one time he was so homesick that he ate all of what he could find in one sitting.”
Susan spoke on the phone with her husband every few days. Sometimes toward the end of his trips, he would start calling home more and more frequently, she said.
“I could tell that the distance was starting to get to him,” she said. “Not that he wanted to come home because he didn’t love where he was, it wasn’t that.”
Sometimes she didn’t even know what country he was in, or what time zone.
The trips that caused the most stress for Susan were when Jim traveled to Venezuela, Yemen and Syria. She knows that tragedy can happen anywhere, and her mantra has always been that you only have one life, so chase after your goals.
But before Jim left for each of these countries, they sat down and had a conversation about what would happen if he died on those trips.
“We had talked about the fact that if anything did happen to him, at least he was doing what he loved, if he passed for any reason,” she said.
Like Jim, Susan leaned into her own faith during those hard days when she hadn’t heard from her husband or didn’t know where he was.
“I had two choices, I could make myself sick and not be able to get through my day and not be a mom to my kids,” she said. “Or, I would just have faith that everything would be OK or everything would work out the way it was meant to.”
She never shared any of her fears with the kids. But Karsen harbored her own. From a young age, she knew some of the trips her dad took were dangerous. And weeks would pass where she didn’t hear from him.
“I would just be wondering, ‘Oh my god is my dad dead?’” Karsen said. “And then when all that would subside and he would come back, he would share these amazing, amazing experiences that no one else would be able to have.”
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Through it all, Jim never forgot his childhood ambitions. In his office, he keeps one of the original pamphlets marketing Project Space Voyage. That experience was the moment when those dreams first showed even the faintest shine of possibility.
On the Blue Origin trip, Jim was joined by five other people, including the architect of the New Shepard capsule, who replaced the spot vacated by comedian Pete Davidson, originally announced as a member of the crew. Jim suspects Davidson “chickened out.”
On board, he brought his passports, a photograph of his family and a deflated UNC basketball signed by Michael Jordan and Dean Smith.
Karsen was two miles from the launchpad on the morning of March 31. As the capsule took off, the ground shook and air rushed past her.
“It sounded kind of like a gunshot, but if the world was holding the gun,” she said.
The sound consumed the entire space, and she felt like she was watching a choreographed dance. The capsule got smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the sky.
Her friends back at UNC would later ask if she was scared at that moment, but truly, she wasn’t, she says.
“I knew if my dad was going to die doing something like that, he would have already died,” she said.
Aboard the spacecraft, Jim saw the curvature of Earth, defined by the blue of the ocean and overlaid with a thin, wispy atmosphere.
But it wasn’t the view of the planet that shocked Jim, it was the rest of it.
“It’s the black that is so stark, so void of light,” he said. “Your brain just can’t process that.”
Once the capsule hit zero gravity, the crew could float around the cabin. Jim had all 10 passports he’s accrued tucked away in his pocket.
As the capsule hung suspended over the Earth, he pulled out one of the passports, and one of the crew members made a stamping motion on a page.
Susan was at the landing site, ready to welcome Jim back when he landed. His friends from college, the ones who had scoffed at his endeavor to sell Project Space Voyage trips, were there, too.
When he returned, Jim stepped off the capsule in his suit and held up a flag labeled “194.”
That blue spacesuit, with “J. Kitchen” emblazoned in white letters on one side and a pin representing the wings of an astronaut on the other, hangs in front of a window overlooking Franklin Street in Chapel Hill today, in the office of just an “ordinary professor.”
Where do you go when you’ve been everywhere?
After 194 places, Jim knows who he is now. He’s someone who gets homesick after three weeks. Someone who prefers to meet people more than places. And someone with four core needs: to be loved, to love others, to be content and to love himself.
And he’s been sharing these lessons he’s learned in the classroom since he started at UNC in 2010.
Cameron Fardy, a junior communications and political science major, took Jim’s class in 2021. On the first day, Jim asked students to write their one-year goals on index cards across six categories: personal, financial, educational, fitness, social and spiritual. Fardy’s still hangs on a corkboard in her bedroom.
Alex Mazer is a senior, and his first class at UNC was Jim’s. Every day surprised him, from the time Jim passed around $50 bills for a create-your-own-business project, to the last class when he gave each student a book, “The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work.” Jim said that while UNC can teach students a lot, there isn’t time in the syllabus to talk about one of the most important aspects of life: relationships.
While he was on the way to 193, many suggested Jim write his own book. But he always shrugged it off, refusing to submit to a preconceived narrative as he continued to explore the world.
But after being stuck inside due to a pandemic, he compiled his notes and wrote it all down. He’s now putting on finishing that book about the countries he’s visited and the lessons he’s learned along the way.
But there’s still more to explore. For example, Jim wants to go even deeper into space to see more of the planet.
“I want to see the whole thing,” Jim said.
And even though he’s seen the lands of Earth from the ground and above, that only makes up a fraction of the planet. Seventy percent of the planet is made up of water. Maybe there’s something to explore there.
“To see the blackness of the Earth from space and see the blackness of the Earth from below,” he said. “It’d be an interesting paradox.”
