Living And Working In Space: The Countdown Has Begun

Just think of it, a future documentary on careers might begin something like this: "my grandfather was a Martian mineworker, my father hauled his share of precious metals out of Martian mines, and I'm a Red Planet kind of gal myself." Living and Working in Space, produced by the same folk who made the Futures series starring Jaime Escalante (immortalized in 1987's Stand and Deliver), gets off to a snail-paced start with a handful of slow skits involving Escalante and a student, Kathy Bates as an astro-mom, and a pair of miners drilling and shooting the breeze. The skits seem even slower since they're bookended by rapid-fire edited sequences with aeronautics professionals who are barely able to complete a sentence before the next sound bite zooms in. Of course, for kids, this warpspeed editing is no problemo, and since the program is aimed at kids, my carping about little things like logical sequences and pauses with room for thought are a bit beside the point. Fortunately, after the initial quarter-hour, Living and Working in Space settles some and punches up the skits to the point where children and their parents can enjoy the show. Interviewing designers of space suits and space stations, health and fitness experts, and NASA engineers, the program drives home the point that most current professions on Earth will have their counterparts in space in perhaps 20 to 30 years (space program funding, or lack thereof, is not mentioned, however). Pat Morita, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Billy Bob Thornton, Esai Morales, Sheila Tousey, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura are among the numerous guests who help out with the skits (my favorite has Thornton trying to get a building license for a cheap hotel chain with no artificial gravity, and therefore lower prices--although the people might wake up on the ceiling). An eye-opening and thought-provoking guide to the peculiarities of living and working in space, this is recommended. (See THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: GOIN' BACK TO T-TOWN for availability.)