House Again OKs Smaller Space Station : Spending: The vote of 220 to 196 keeps alive plans to build a $25.5-billion orbiting laboratory. New support is attributed to lobbying.

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 $25.5-billion orbiting space laboratory. Only last Wednesday, the program survived an earlier attempt on its life by a single vote.

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.

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 $6 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.

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.

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.