[iansales]

John W Campbell, Leinster, van Vogt, Heinlein and Anderson are all more than fifty years old, and many of the books will be out of print. Jack Campbell is military sf, not "exploration" - unless you define exploration as "finding new worlds and new alien races... and then killing them"...

Cherryh is good, though her last few books have all been from the atevi series (13 books and counting...). New Space Opera dosn't actually have much exploration or ESP in it, though you can't go wrong with Banks, Baxter, Reynolds, Gibson, Cobley, Powell, or any of their contemporaries. Also good is Paul McAuley, Sean Williams, Chris Moriarty, Eric Brown, Adam Roberts, Kameron Hurley...

To tell the truth, ESP's not an especially popular trope at the moment, although I think it crops up in Catherine Asaro's Skolian Saga. In fact, now I think about it, even exploration also seems to be on the way out, if not already gone. It's mostly space opera or near-future sf these days.