House Again OKs a Smaller Space Station

With votes to spare, the House decided Monday for the second time in a week to continue building a scaled-back version of Space Station Freedom.

After two hours of debate, lawmakers voted, 220 to 196, to reject an amendment that would have cut the heart out of President Clinton’s plan to build a $25-billion orbiting space laboratory. Only last Wednesday, the program survived an earlier attempt on its life by a single vote.

“That was a very strong vote,” said Thomas E. Williams, spokesman for McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in Huntington Beach, one of the space station’s three prime contractors. “The White House had to have been out working hard.”

An exultant Daniel S. Goldin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, attributed the growing support to an intense lobbying effort by the White House and congressional supporters.

“We hit the phones, we called the people and we explained the issues,” Goldin said. One hundred and eight Democrats joined 112 Republicans to provide the winning margin. Among California’s 52 lawmakers, 15 Democrats and 19 Republicans voted to save the program. All six Orange Country congressmen voted to save the space station.

“The Cold War is over,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), whose district is home to McDonnell Douglas. “Highly trained Americans helped us win that twilight struggle . . . the same folks whose lives and mortgage payments are now on the line. The Space Station is defense conversion.”

McDonnell Douglas, which holds space station contracts worth more than $4 billion, has about 3,000 employees at its Huntington Beach plant who are directly and indirectly working on the project, according to Williams.

The action came as the House debated an $88-billion spending bill that would provide funds for housing, veterans and independent federal agencies for the 1994 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

The bill contains $14.5 billion for NASA, including $2.1 billion for the space station program. An amendment offered by Reps. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.) and Dick Zimmer (R-N.J.) would have cut the space station allocation to $1.2 billion, which would have paid termination costs.

The space station, redesigned over the last three months at the direction of Clinton, is intended to provide an orbiting platform to conduct research in a weightless environment. It is to be built in a series of space shuttle missions, and permanently occupied by a crew of four by 2001.

NASA already has spent $9 billion on the space station and under the White House plan would spend $2.1 billion in each of the next five years. Another $5.5 billion would be required to bring the station to permanent occupancy.

The successive House votes suggest that Clinton’s pared-down space station will be built. Although the program has yet to be considered by the Senate, its chances for survival there are believed to be good.

The lobbying effort on Monday included a summons for a White House meeting with Vice President Al Gore for more than two dozen freshman Democrats who had voiced opposition to the program, said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Brown said he and other supporters worked the telephones and the hallways of the Capitol to round up votes.

The fate of the space station is being watched carefully in Southern California, home to two of the program’s three prime contractors--McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in Huntington Beach, and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park. The companies hold space station contracts worth more than $6 billion. Sixty other California companies employ more than 4,000 people on the project.

During Monday’s late-night debate, critics argued that even the pared-down laboratory is a luxury the nation can ill afford in tough economic times, and that cost-cutting has hopelessly compromised the space station’s scientific mission.

“If you vote for the space station, you are voting against housing, you are voting against environmental cleanup, against vets, against funding for proven scientific projects,” said Rep. Marge Roukema (R-N.J.). “This is not about Isabella and Columbus. We are spending our heritage on foolish pie in the sky.”

But supporters insisted that despite the cost-cutting, the program will yield important science. Killing it, they said, would put an end to the nation’s leadership in human space exploration--and another nail in the coffin of the American aerospace industry.

“If you vote against the space station, you vote to stop the space program dead in its tracks,” said Rep. Michael A. Andrews (D-Tex.).