New Design Key to Space Station Jobs : Aerospace: Impact of proposed cuts on California workers won’t be known until revised plans--the 5th set in 9 years--are delivered in 3 months.
The Clinton Administration’s plan to cut the $30-billion bill for building space station Freedom could yield a streamlined laboratory that will be cheaper and easier to assemble in space, but it also will cost California more aerospace jobs.
The precise impact of the proposed cuts will remain uncertain until the National Aeronautics and Space Administration produces a new design for the space platform, which is to orbit about 200 miles above the Earth. The new design is scheduled to be completed in about three months.
However, Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said Friday that the Administation plans to cut several billion dollars out of the program over the next four years. NASA already has spent $8 billion on it.
In announcing the fifth space station redesign in nine years, the Clinton Administration said it will try to preserve the approximately 70,000 jobs directly and indirectly related to station construction. More than 4,200 California workers are directly employed by space station contractors.
But a key congressional aide familiar with the program said the pledge to the workers “can only be a one-year promise.”
In an interview Friday, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said the impact on space station jobs will not be felt until the end of 1994. By then, he said, the Administration’s plan to boost spending on aeronautics research will create new jobs to make up for any losses associated with downsizing the space station.
Goldin acknowledged, however, that the new jobs would not necessarily be at the same companies that will lose space station workers.
“We’re going to do our very best to maintain continuity,” the administrator added.
Details of the internal White House battle that produced two weeks of topsy-turvy space station news began emerging Friday.
According to space industry analysts and congressional sources, longtime station critic Leon E. Panetta, director of the Office of Management and Budget, touched off the firestorm two weeks ago when he formally proposed killing both the space station and an $8-billion atom smasher known as the superconducting super collider.
Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, who had supported both projects during the presidential campaign, vetoed that plan, but suggested that the space program could be trimmed. At that point, Goldin held a series of meetings in which he reportedly presented Panetta with a number of options for scaling back the program.
“Goldin made a really strong pitch that he would do anything he (Panetta) wanted,” said Brown, both to save the program and to demonstrate his effectiveness as an administrator. Appointed by former President George Bush a year ago, Goldin would like to remain NASA administrator under Clinton.
The intent of the new design, Goldin said Friday, is to reduce both the space station’s $30-billion development cost, and operating costs over its projected 30-year life. Operating costs have been variously estimated at anywhere from $60 billion to $180 billion, depending on the accounting method.
Goldin said he has been particularly concerned that current plans call for 17 space shuttle flights to assemble the space station in orbit, and will seek to reduce that figure. The first flight had been scheduled for November, 1995, but could be pushed back because of redesign efforts.
Senior congressional aides familiar with the space program said the Administration could have done a better job communicating its plans to Congress, but that the early mixed signals are not likely to produce serious problems.
Brown said it is too early to tell what kind of reception the new space station plan will get on Capitol Hill. One scenario, he said, gives the station a much easier ride this year, with critics of the program claiming a victory for cutting costs, and supporters breathing a sigh of relief for saving the program.
The hardest task remains the redesign, Brown said. The congressman said that Goldin will choose Joseph F. Shea, a retired senior vice president of Raytheon Co. and a former NASA official, to lead the team that will plan the new station.
