NASA Chief Says Future Is Tied to U.S. Space Station : Cosmos: Its fate is closely watched in Huntington Beach, where McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. holds project contracts that are valued at $3.5 billion.

In his most spirited defense yet of the nation’s manned space program, new NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin on Wednesday launched a high-stakes campaign to save the threatened Space Station Freedom from the congressional budget ax.

“Space is no longer just an experiment or a symbol,” he told more than 100 leaders of the aerospace industry at a meeting in suburban Virginia. “Space is an essential part of America’s future in medicine, science and technology.”

The fate of the space station is being closely watched in Orange County, where McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. of Huntington Beach holds project contracts valued at $3.5 billion.

Expected to cost $30 billion to $40 billion through the year 2000, the station is to be debated next month in the House. The Administration is asking for $2.2 billion for the project in the 1993 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

Critics say the project is an extravagance the nation can ill afford in tough economic times and that the station has been so pared down that it can no longer adequately carry out its planned scientific mission.

It was originally to carry a crew of eight, for example. But $8 billion in budget cuts demanded by Congress forced NASA to reduce both living and laboratory space and cut the crew size to four astronauts. Scientists complained that the smaller crew will not be able to produce the volume or quality of work planned for the station.

But supporters say the station is a key to the manned space program’s future and the country’s destiny as a space-faring nation.

In a move that caused consternation at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the House last week voted to kill an $8.2-billion atom smasher, the super-conducting super collider. Along with the station, the collider was one of the nation’s premier “big-science” projects.

Arguing that manned space missions offer important payoffs on Earth, Goldin cited three decades of space technology spinoffs that made possible modern long-distance telephone service, automated teller machines, CAT scanners and intensive-care monitoring.

Life science research to be conducted on the planned station is crucial to the future of human space exploration, Goldin said, including colonization of the moon and manned missions to Mars and beyond in the 21st Century.

“There is simply no substitute for a permanent laboratory in space,” Goldin said. “In a country that focuses all too often on the short term, NASA is the one agency dedicated to our future. . . .

“But NASA doesn’t spend money in space,” Goldin said. “We spend it on Earth, for the people of Earth. And we spend it right here in America.”

But some critics remained unconvinced. “I believe that it’s rather dangerous to pin a lot of Space Station Freedom . . . on (those) kinds of medical spinoffs or material science spinoffs,” said Louis J. Lanzerotti, chairman of the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences.

John Pike, director of the space policy project for the Federation of American Scientists, said: “When we say the space station is going to cure the common cold and cancer . . . and all these other snake-oil arguments, that’s because we know the public supports medical research.”