McDonnell, Japanese Firm in Joint Project : * Space: The two companies will work together on technologies for a permanent lunar colony.

In an unusual international cooperative effort in space exploration, McDonnell Douglas Corp. is teaming up with a Japanese engineering company to develop technologies that someday could be used to establish permanent colonies on the moon or to explore Mars.

McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co., a major contractor on the controversial space station program, said Thursday that it had reached agreement with Shimizu Corp., Japan’s largest general contracting firm. Shimizu has been involved in many U.S. commercial projects.

In 1989, President Bush announced a program to establish a permanently manned base on the moon during the first decade of the next century as part of a long-term goal of sending a manned mission to Mars.

The lunar project would be critical to any aerospace company hoping to play a role in what eventually could become the next major international space project after the space station.

“This is an exciting step,” said Robert Sirko, project manager for McDonnell Douglas. “We would hope to use the moon to develop the life-support systems that would be needed for a trip to Mars.”

The lunar project would be much larger in scope than NASA’s planned $30-billion space station, which has come under criticism in Congress and in scientific circles as overly expensive and lacking justification from a scientific standpoint.

Sirko said a team of engineers from both companies will work on the project in Huntington Beach. He declined to specify how much each company will invest in the project.

The firms will develop five technologies that are deemed necessary to build a lunar base that could sustain human life. Sirko said the companies will explore the use of solar energy to melt the lunar soil into useful resources, such as oxygen or brick-like building materials. Last year, McDonnell Douglas engineers demonstrated a prototype solar-energy device that uses a concentrated energy beam to break rocks.

The team would also study life-support systems, construction techniques that could shield astronauts from radiation, robotic equipment for use in near-zero gravity, and the recycling of waste products and other resources.

Shimizu will contribute its civil engineering experience with building large structures. Sirko said the agreement has been in the making for more than two years and was approved by the State Department several months ago.

McDonnell Douglas is cooperating with other companies on the project, Sirko said, including International Business Machines Corp., General Electric Co. and Honeywell Corp., but no formal alliances have been forged with any of those companies or any other foreign firms.