Space Station’s Future Is Up in Air Again : Politics: Clinton aides say White House will again scale down orbiting lab critical to Southland contractors.

The future of NASA’s planned Space Station Freedom was in doubt again Wednesday after a Clinton Administration official told surprised congressional aides that the White House will once again redesign the controversial orbiting laboratory to cut its size and long-term cost.

The news stunned officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, who on Friday were led to believe that they had won a major victory over Administration critics intent on slashing the program’s budget.

Despite persistent rumors of severe budget cuts, two senior members of Congress announced Friday afternoon that Vice President Al Gore had assured them the space station would get full funding of $2.25 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

But Wednesday morning, a senior aide to Gore told a gathering of congressional staff members that half of that money would pay the cost of terminating existing contracts on the station. Much of the rest would be spent to develop a new, scaled-back design, according to congressional sources.

“The message on Friday . . . was pretty clear,” said one NASA official, who insisted on anonymity. “This is not what people expected.”

Starting fresh with a new design would seriously delay the project, perhaps for several years, beyond the planned initial launch date of November, 1995, industry analysts said. That could lead to an erosion of congressional support.

“Those who think we should not be building the station at all will certainly have additional ammunition,” said John E. Pike, who heads the space policy project for the Federation of American Scientists. “It may be the (the Administration’s) way of allowing Congress to cancel it for them.”

However, a spokeswoman for Gore said Wednesday that the Clinton Administration wants a space station built but not necessarily the one that NASA has designed.

“The Administration has a commitment to preserve the science and jobs but also to deal with the (cost overruns and other) problems that we face,” Marla Romash said. “We are talking about restructuring. We are talking about moving forward in a different direction.”

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

Contractors were blindsided by the news. “It’s very confusing to say the least,” said spokesman Thomas E. Williams of McDonnell Douglas. “To go to a clean paper at this point would be very surprising.”

In a related development, the Clinton Administration vowed to push on with work on the nation’s other major science project, an $8-billion atom smasher known as the superconducting super-collider, to be built in Texas. According to the White House, spending on the super-collider will increase $108 million to $640 million in the 1994 fiscal year. The budget will increase 3% a year until the project is completed in 2003.

Wednesday’s space station news was the latest twist in what has become in a planetary version of the “Perils of Pauline.” Critics seeking to kill off the program, including Leon E. Panetta, director of the Office of Management and Budget, contend that the nation can ill afford a lavish science project of dubious social value in tough economic times.

But supporters, including key members of Congress whose home districts benefit from NASA contracts, argue that killing the space station would end the nation’s manned space program.

The space station’s intended mission is to provide an orbiting platform for the study of long-term human exposure to space and the behavior of industrial materials in a weightless environment.

Industry sources have said they believe NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, appointed last year by former President George Bush, has been quietly cooperating in Panetta’s effort to cut station costs in order to preserve his job in the Clinton Administration.

NASA has estimated that assembling the space station in orbit will cost a total of $30 billion through the end of the decade. The station could cost an additional $118 billion to operate over its planned 30-year life, according to congressional estimates. The space agency already has spent $8 billion on the project.

Significant cuts in the space station budget would require the project’s second major redesign in as many years and further compromise the project’s scientific potential, according to independent space analysts and industry officials.

Two years ago, NASA released a scaled-down design that cut $8 billion from the station’s construction cost, reduced the size of laboratory and living modules, cut the power supply and eliminated half of the station’s eight-person crew.