Space Station Redesigns Top Cost Goals : Budget: NASA lowers price tags on three options, but even the cheapest falls $3 billion short of target. Plan goes to experts who will advise Clinton.

U.S. space officials Monday unveiled three ambitious plans for saving the controversial orbiting space station by lowering its price tag but none meets the cost-cutting goals set by the Clinton White House.

The three options outlined by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would halve the $2-billion annual operating costs of Space Station Freedom and reduce the project’s total construction and development costs by as much as $10.5 billion.

Much of the savings would come from trimming the space station’s complex management structure and reducing from three to one the number of prime contractors working on it.

But even the least expensive plan falls $3 billion short of lowering the five-year development costs for a fully operational space station to the $9-billion maximum demanded by White House science and technology adviser John Gibbons.

Nevertheless, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin lauded the work of NASA’s redesign team, saying that the team’s efforts mark a new era of hard-nosed honesty in the American space program.

“We have taken a rigorous approach to accounting for the true costs of building a space station,” Goldin said. “We are laying real costs and real options before the American people. . . . Now we as a nation can pause to consider what kind of future we want to build.”

Whether the strategy will save the space station from the budget ax remains to be seen. The White House had no immediate comment on NASA’s announcement but some White House officials have said that they could not support any increases in the space station budget above $9 billion over the next five years. However, another Administration official suggested Monday that the $9-billion ceiling could rise.

After it is reviewed by a 16-member panel of space industry experts, the NASA report is to be presented to President Clinton Thursday. The President is expected to decide by early next week whether to proceed with any of the space station options. Congress must pass final judgment.

Both Clinton and Vice President Al Gore endorsed the space station program during last year’s campaign. But some of their top advisers, including Leon E. Panetta, director of the Office of Management and Budget, want to kill the program to save money for other domestic priorities.

First announced in 1984 by then-President Ronald Reagan, the space station is intended to serve as a sophisticated laboratory, orbiting 200 miles above the Earth, to study the long-term effects of weightlessness on humans and industrial materials.

The station’s future is critical to California’s beleaguered aerospace industry, which has more than $6 billion in contracts and more than 4,000 jobs riding on the project.

During a daylong session at a suburban Virginia hotel, NASA outlined plans for three different types of space stations whose construction and development costs over the next five years would range from $11.9 billion to $13.3 billion. The White House had asked the space agency to develop options that would cost $5 billion, $7 billion or $9 billion over that period. The new figures compare with NASA’s assessment that the space station plan in place before the latest redesign efforts actually would have cost as much as $17.5 billion through the 1998 fiscal year, not the $12.4 billion that NASA had previously estimated.

Viewed another way, the new NASA numbers indicate that the total cost of the previous space station plan, including some costs that had been scattered elsewhere in the NASA budget, would have reached $35.8 billion. NASA previously had used a figure of $31.3 billion.

The total cost of the new options would range from $25.2 billion to $30.3 billion, including the $11.2 billion spent since the space station program was announced nine years ago. In addition, NASA officials said that they could trim annual operating costs after the station is built from $2 billion to $1 billion, largely by simplifying the program’s management.

The least expensive option, which would cost $11.9 billion over the next five years and $25.2 billion total, would involve the launch of a core space station on a single space shuttle flight. Fully outfitting the 23-foot-wide by 92-foot-long cylinder would require nine more launches.

The most expensive option, which would require an expenditure of $13.3 billion over five years, would look the most like the last plan for the space station. Pressurized living and laboratory modules and solar panels would be suspended from a 271-foot spar.