U.S. Committed to Scaled-Back Space Station

Brushing aside scientists’ criticism of the scaled-back Space Station Freedom, the Bush Administration vowed Wednesday to push forward with the long-planned multibillion-dollar project and enlisted the support of key congressional budget writers.

“Is America going to lead the way to space? That’s the fundamental question,” said Vice President Dan Quayle, who heads the country’s top space policy organization, the National Space Council. “The answer to that is yes.”

After a meeting with a dozen members of Congress who will play critical roles in financing the project, Quayle announced that the Space Council has given formal approval to the redesigned space station and that it has directed NASA to forward the new plans to Capitol Hill.

The decision, in effect, overrides objections voiced last week by the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The board complained that $6 billion in cost reductions demanded by Congress had produced a space station so severely cut back that its scientific mission would be crippled.

But there was little support for that view among the lawmakers who met with Quayle.

“I think Congress is committed to the space station, and I think Congress is going to be committed to the redesign of the space station,” said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who heads the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“I think that people are hardly startled that, having cut $6 billion out of the space station . . . there will be some degradation of its ability to do the multiple things we are asking it to do,” said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), a member of Mikulski’s subcommittee.

Nevertheless, Gramm said, “There’s nothing in this (Space Studies Board) report that calls the new design into question, in my mind.”

The lawmakers cautioned, however, that the level of support for the space station will depend on how much their appropriations panels are given to spend by the House and Senate budget committees.

Meanwhile, a NASA official warned that the scaled-back design could cost jobs at major contracting firms working on the space station. Affected firms include McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. of Huntington Beach, Calif., which holds space station contracts valued at up to $4 billion, and Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne Division in Canoga Park, Calif., which has a contract worth $1.8 billion.

However, a McDonnell Douglas spokesman said that the company trimmed its 12,000-person work force by 300 in January and that it sees no immediate need for additional layoffs. About 2,000 employees are working directly on the space station.

The space station program, plagued by budget problems since its inception in 1984, ran into serious trouble last fall when Congress cut its 1991 budget to $1.9 billion from $2.5 billion.

In addition to the funding cut, House and Senate appropriations committees told NASA to scale back plans for the station to accommodate a budget of about $15.6 billion through 1996, rather than the $21.5 billion that NASA had expected.

Before the redesign, the total cost of the station had been pegged at about $37 billion.

The new plans call for changing the shape and reducing the length of the metal truss structure that will form the backbone of the station, reducing to three from four the number of giant solar arrays that will power it and cutting to 27 feet from 44 feet the length of the laboratory and living modules in which astronauts will work, eat and sleep.

The first components of the station are to be launched in 1996, and final assembly is scheduled for 1999, or the year 2000. The changes will permit most of the station components to be assembled on the ground, before they are lifted into a low Earth orbit aboard a space shuttle. But they also will cut the station’s power supply to 57.5 kilowatts from 75 kilowatts and restrict crew capacity to four instead of eight astronauts.

Japan and the European Space Agency, which have agreed to pay part of the cost of the project and will be allowed to attach their own research modules to the station, are satisfied with the new proposal, NASA officials said.

The reductions prompted the Space Studies Board, in a report released last Friday, to conclude that the new station “does not meet the basic research requirements of the two principal scientific disciplines for which it is intended”: life sciences and microgravity research.

Referring to the board’s objections, Quayle said Wednesday: “I think they were looking at it from a very narrow perspective.”