Tricky Navigation on Space Issues

When the Clinton Administration decided to pull the plug on the latest design for space station Freedom, California lawmakers found themselves in a quandary.

They realize that spending cuts in programs like the $30-billion space station may be the best medicine for the nation’s fiscal overindulgence. But the lawmakers also know that such cuts may be the worst prescription for recession-ravaged California--witness the anguished reaction to the recent round of military base closing announcements.

The conflict has proved particularly troublesome for conservative Republicans such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who is pushing Clinton for further budget cuts, and liberal Democrats such as Sen. Barbara Boxer, who has long argued that space money would be better spent on social programs.

Despite their ideological problems with the project, they know that the space station program has been a mainstay of California’s beleaguered aerospace industry and the men

and women it employs.

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California is home to two of the space station’s three prime contractors--McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. in Huntington Beach (and in Rohrabacher’s district), and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park. According to the latest figures from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the present value of their contracts is approaching $6 billion.

More than 60 other California companies hold subcontracts on the project, and altogether more than 4,200 Californians are working on the program.

Lawmakers are eager to take the high ground in these increasingly inconvenient congressional debates over federal spending.

Former Carmel Valley congressman Leon E. Panetta is a longtime opponent of the program. Panetta, who left his post as chairman of the House Budget Committee this year to become director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has told Clinton that killing off the space station entirely would be in the nation’s best interest because it would help reduce the national debt.

On the other side, Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, insists that the country needs a strong space station program to ensure its future as a power in space exploration.

Boxer and Rohrabacher are caught in the middle, somewhere between ideology and the unemployment rate.

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During her tenure in the House of Representatives, Boxer was an outspoken critic of the space station program. In a 1991 hearing, for example, the congresswoman excoriated then-NASA Administrator Richard H. Truly, accusing him of playing fast and loose with the facts surrounding the orbiting laboratory’s long-term costs. That same year, she voted against an appropriations amendment, ultimately passed, that restored space station funding.

Boxer’s Northern California district, coincidentally, was not home to any of the major space station contractors.

Now Boxer says she is willing to support a smaller space station. “I have always felt that the space station was too large a science project,” she told The Times last month. “We could actually create more jobs and do more good if we had smaller science. . . .

“The question I have to decide (now) is, ‘Do you continue fighting against something that has already passed three times? Does it make sense to turn it around when we’ve already made an investment?’ ”

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Rohrabacher, who normally measures his distance from Boxer on the issues in light-years, sounded a surprisingly similar theme in an interview this week.

“If this had been 10 years ago, when they first decided to move forward with the space station, I would have suggested they postpone it,” said the three-term congressman, who has criticized NASA for allowing cost overruns but defended the role of McDonnell Douglas engineers.

But Rohrabacher said now is not the time to kill the program. “Once you have a major investment, and it’s proceeding, you don’t just flush all the money down the toilet. You try to get the best use out of what you’ve already begun,” he said.

In the end, the flap over the space station among California lawmakers may turn out to be one of the best illustrations of an old Capitol Hill adage. In its modern form, it goes like this: “In your district, this project is pure pork. In mine, it’s an important infrastructure investment.”