What They're Reading In Outer Space These Days

Editor’s note: As some of you may recall I have a habit of prowling through images from the ISS looking for strange things the crew has floating around.

If you look closely at this Flight Day 4 image [lo res][hi res] You can see a magazine next to astronaut Steve Robinson.

By rotating the image and distorting it a bit, and then doing a web search, I discovered that this is the April 2005 issue of Men’s Journal (That’s Robert Redford on the cover).

The feature article is “50 Best Places to Live“: “What’s the most adventure-packed town in America? The least stressful? The smartest, healthiest, sexiest?”.

Another article is “Secrets of Power and Muscle”: “Want to get seriously ripped? Follow this workout and add muscle mass like you never knew was possible”.

What is it about this magazine that someone was inspired to carry the entire thing into orbit?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to put it on a CD instead of shipping all that paper?

Is this part of the valuable cargo Discovery brought up?