Living and Working in Space: The Countdown Has Begun

A PBS documentary from the early nineties, its definitely showing its age. The show's basically a bunch of short skits (alternately funny and bizarre) with minor celebrities interspersed with actual predictions and explanations from scientists. Unfortunately some of those predictions are of the "By the end of the century we'll be doing something completely ridiculous like living on the moon. No seriously, we will," variety.

It was well thought out, I'll give them that. Segments like the one on interior design in space are thought-provoking, and probably would be a real concern for the first space pioneers (they talk about how things like furniture and wall colors will need to change to stave off boredom and insanity), even if it seems a bit trivial.

What I really thought was interesting was, early on, one of the scientists mentions that space exploration would be like frontier life. They then showed scenes of space travel paralleled with the taming of the west. Maybe I've got "Firefly" on the brain, but the first thing I thought was, "Holy crap, Joss Whedon must've seen this." Maybe he didn't, but its still not a bad little program if you can find it.

You have to take this for what it is, part of a classroom series on the future for kids in middle and high school. These types of things are rarely high art but if you hare interested in this subject, there are far worse videos to check out.

What is very interesting about this one is that they did get the important people of the day in the industry to do the backgrounders.

Also, this features many parts of the last interview with Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill (Princeton University Nuclear Physicist, Inventor of Storage-Ring technology that is used in every particle accelerator, inventor of of the Triad and GeoStar system that did then what GPS does now. Also O'Neill is known for doing the detailed work on and popularization of large Space Habitats, he created the Mass-Driver concept and brought together Peter Glaser and Bill Brown together to make Solar Power Satellites an understandable technology). For these interviews alone, it is worth watching and accepting the not-great acting segments.

Worth it, taken for what it is.

"Living and Working in Space" is a brief study of life in space, both in 1993, and in the near-future. It features an assortment of skits with documentary footage about life in space. The main story involves a high-school student, named Arturo, (Raymond Cruz), who is confessing to his calculus teacher(Jaime Escalante), that he finds the subject too taxing. After a few words of encouragement, the story jumps ahead about 10 or 15 years, to find our student now en-route to the Moon.

Other sketches include a couple of asteroid miners (Vincent Schiavelli, James Stephens III) , an asteroid deflection team(Pat Morita, Sheila Tousey) , and a Lunar Chemical Engineer with a housekeeping problem (Kathy Bates). The best of these sketches involves a Lunar economic development agent (Rodney Grant)reviewing a series of 'off-beat' applicants. The weakest sketch involves Jesse Ventura as a DMV candidate, taking a Lunar Driving test. The whole skit just shows him thinking. This was well before he became governor of Minnesota. This program would be good to get middle school students involved in the study of space.