Living and Working in Space: The Countdown Has Begun

"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.