Space Station Funding Is Safe, Officials Say : Congress: Despite rumors of cuts, lawmaker and Clinton aide confirm that the President will seek full $2.25 billion for project during the next fiscal year.

Despite rampant rumors that the Clinton Administration plans dramatic cuts in NASA’s space station program, a senior Texas congressman said Vice President Al Gore assured him Friday that the controversial project will be fully funded next year.

The announcement by Rep. Jack Brooks (R-Tex.), whose district includes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center, capped a day in which congressional and aerospace industry sources had said they were expecting severe cuts in the $30-billion program to build an orbiting space laboratory.

A highly placed official in the Clinton Administration confirmed Brooks’ announcement, saying the President will ask Congress for $2.25 billion for the space station when he unveils his budget for the 1994 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That is the full amount that NASA initially had sought. “Brooks’ number is right,” the source said.

Clinton was more equivocal when he was asked about the space station before a meeting with congressional leaders Friday afternoon. “Tune in Wednesday,” he said, referring to his address to a joint session of Congress next week.

The future of the space station is crucial to California’s beleaguered aerospace industry, which has more than $5 billion riding on the project.

California is home to two of the project’s three prime contractors--McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. of Huntington Beach and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park--and about 60 subcontractors. Together the companies hold station contracts worth more than $5 billion and employ more than 4,200 workers involved in the project.

The space station’s latest roller-coaster ride began last week, when Leon E. Panetta, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a longtime station opponent, suggested to Clinton that he terminate the program to help reduce the budget deficit. Both Clinton and Gore backed the project during the presidential campaign.

Panetta’s move, which was instantly leaked to the press, touched off an intense lobbying effort by members of Congress who support the space station and have fought the station’s critics on Capitol Hill for the last two years.

Aerospace industry sources insisted Friday that Panetta and NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin earlier this week worked out a plan to cut the 1994 budget for the space station to $1.3 billion, a funding level that would have crippled the program. Under the terms of the deal, station funding would not have risen above that level through the end of the decade.

Several industry sources said they believed that Goldin, appointed last year by former President George Bush, cooperated in Panetta’s plan to cut station funding in an effort to keep his job under Clinton. Goldin was not available for comment Friday.

“It’s manifestly not enough to put together the station they’ve been talking about,” said John E. Pike, director of the space policy project for the Federation of American Scientists. “You can’t build the station with that money.”

However, Panetta apparently was overruled by Gore, who has championed the development of new American technology.

Cutting the space station budget to $1.3 billion would have forced NASA to dramatically reduce the space station’s scientific capabilities and would have further delayed the project, according to independent space analysts and aerospace industry officials.

The station’s stated mission is to conduct life-science and micro-gravity research--studying how humans react to long exposure to weightlessness and how industrial materials can be processed in space.

The latest approved plans for the orbiting laboratory call for two, 22-foot-long modules--one for living and one for experiments--to be suspended on a 300-foot metal truss about 200 miles above the Earth. Solar panels attached to each end of the truss would provide power to run the station.

The station would be launched, piece by piece, aboard a series of space shuttle flights beginning in November, 1995, and would be ready to accommodate a full crew of four astronauts by the year 2000.

That design would cost about $30 billion through the end of the decade, NASA has estimated. The General Accounting Office, however, has suggested that the figure would be $40 billion. The European Space Agency and space agencies in Japan and Canada have agreed to contribute $8 billion to the effort.