Wilson Envoys Will Lobby for Space Station

With California already spinning from defense cuts, Gov. Pete Wilson announced Thursday that he will send a delegation of state officials and business leaders to Washington in two weeks to lobby for continued funding of the troubled space station.

The station, a sophisticated orbiting laboratory already 10 years and $12 billion in the making, accounts for more than 4,200 California workers, about a third of them in Orange County.

But funding for the long and costly project has lately been in danger, with a key member of Congress threatening to withdraw his support if National Aeronautics and Space Administration funding continues to dwindle.

“Spending for the space station is in jeopardy in the Congress, and California--as a leader in NASA research--has an obligation to provide leadership during the upcoming funding debate in Washington,” Wilson said after a brief tour of the Lockheed Missile & Space Co. in Sunnyvale, which has space station contracts totaling nearly $1 billion. “Washington’s headlong rush to slash defense spending is costing us hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

The space station squeaked through the House by a single vote last year, with several members of Congress questioning the wisdom of continuing a project that, after so much money and time, has yet to be built.

But the station seemed even more imperiled this week when Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), long a champion of space exploration, said he will reluctantly recommend killing the project if NASA loses big again in this year’s budget struggle.

Brown worried that without a firm commitment from Congress to see construction through to the end, the station--which costs $2.1 billion a year--will eventually fail anyway, and it would be wiser to start saving the money now.

Proponents of the station argue that it represents America’s future in space, and NASA officials say a recent streamlining of the space station program has made it considerably more efficient.

Wilson noted that any harm that comes to the space station would indirectly hurt the space shuttle program, which is to be the primary deployment vehicle to the lab. The shuttle program employs another 5,700 Californians.