Bush’s Budget Backs Key O.C. Space Contract

Affirming his commitment to manned space exploration, President Bush said Friday that his new budget will significantly boost funding for Space Station Freedom and other programs intended to help send astronauts back to the moon and to Mars and beyond.

Bush called for spending $2.25 billion on the controversial orbiting space station, an increase of 11%, and said he will triple the funding, to $250 million, for development of a new, more powerful launch system for American rockets.

Officials at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. in Huntington Beach, a major space station contractor, greeted the President’s announcement with enthusiasm.

“It is extremely heartening to see the White House out in front with this important program, especially in these times of tight budgets,” said company spokesman Thomas E. Williams. “What the President has said puts the station directly on track. . . .”

The President also said he will propose $80 million in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget for design work on a new aerospace plane intended to fly from a runway into Earth orbit. And he called for funds for two unmanned satellite missions to complete the mapping of the moon in anticipation of building a manned base there sometime in the 21st Century.

The proposals for the new launch system and the aerospace plane have been announced before, but have not received significant congressional support. Last year, for example, Congress slashed NASA’s appropriation for the aerospace plane to only $5 million.

Nevertheless, Bush said, “I’m asking Americans to make a farsighted commitment, one that looks dozens of years and millions of miles beyond the recession and the other things that tend to preoccupy us today.”

The President made the remarks to 100 youngsters who are members of the Young Astronauts Council, an organization set up by the White House in 1984 to promote space education.

The space station announcement, part of a campaign to build interest in Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday, came as White House officials said the President was considering a plan to set a deadline, with a duration of perhaps 100 days, for Congress to act on his economic proposals.

Such a move would have no binding effect, and Congress has historically paid little heed to such presidential posturing. But the deadline would allow Bush to align himself with those in a hurry for economic action and provide him a political weapon to use against Congress.

A senior White House official cautioned that Bush might choose to stop short of confrontation and instead describe the deadline as a goal.

Space Station Freedom, which will cost at least $30 billion through the end of the decade, is the linchpin of NASA’s plans for manned space exploration in the 21st Century. In addition to serving as a microgravity and life sciences laboratory, the station is intended to provide a jumping-off point for the so-called “Moon-Mars” initiative, which Bush announced in July, 1989.

“Last year, we had an honest debate with those in the Congress who wanted to kill (the) space station,” the President said. “We won, because the American people agree that Space Station Freedom is not only a very valuable scientific program, but it is essential to our destiny as a pioneering nation.”

The space station, which is to be launched piece by piece aboard the space shuttle fleet beginning in 1995 and fully assembled in space by the end of the decade, survived a bruising congressional budget battle last year. In the end, Congress appropriated the full $2 billion requested by the Administration.

Critics, however, insisted that the $30-billion program is too expensive in an era of budget cuts and growing deficits. The space station also has come under attack from scientists, who have said it will not produce research of significant value.

The President reiterated his faith in the station’s scientific mission, as well as his support for re-establishing a base on the moon and sending astronauts to Mars. The Moon-Mars initiative has received virtually no congressional support because of its enormous cost, estimated at more than $400 billion.

But the President sounded more earthly themes as well. Facing a tough reelection campaign and a worsening economy, Bush told the youngsters that the billions of dollars spent on space exploration during the last 30 years have yielded important dividends at home.

“More and more, the new jobs for people of your parents’ generation are being provided by our space programs,” Bush said.