House Vote Keeps Space Station, O.C. Jobs Alive

In another brush with death for the embattled space station, the House voted late Wednesday to retain $2.1 billion in funds to continue research and construction of the orbiting laboratory next year.

Opponents of the station argued for the termination of one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s premier projects, branding it “half-baked science” and an “orbiting boondoggle” that has already cost taxpayers $11.4 billion with nothing under construction to show for it.

But space station advocates prevailed, defeating by a vote of 278 to 155 a bipartisan amendment that would have ended the project once and for all and taken with it thousands of California jobs. Among the hardest hit would have been McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. in Huntington Beach, whose 3,000-member space-station team was cut in half after budget reductions last year.

A version of the $90.5-billion Veterans Affairs Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill, which includes the space station funds, must still pass the Senate. But the space station’s toughest test came Wednesday night in the House.

“The space station represents the expansion of the human spirit and the continuation of the human drive to explore Earth and the universe around it,” Rep. George E. Brown (D-Colton) told the chamber as the emotional, 2 1/2-hour debate ran late into the evening.

NASA has been forced to go begging year after year to a Congress increasingly resistant to funding the space laboratory. Last year the project survived the House by a single vote. Even Brown, the godfather of the project, threatened to withdraw his support last month if it appeared that continued budget cuts would make further research fruitless or if the space station appeared to be raiding funds for other NASA projects.

But after heavy lobbying by the Clinton Administration, sufficient funds were recommended by appropriators and Brown gave the station his most needed endorsement. The White House has called the space station as much a diplomatic tool as anything else since the Russians were brought into the program under a unique agreement last December.

Vice President Al Gore has traveled to Capitol Hill three times in the past two months to garner support for the space station, and both he and President Clinton worked the phones Tuesday and Wednesday in attempts to convince wavering lawmakers.

But foes argued that the orbiting laboratory was siphoning away too many scarce tax dollars.

Rep. Nydia Vasquez (D-N.Y.) called the space station a “luxury hotel in the sky” built at the expense of the nation’s homeless.

In the end, the lawmakers could not bring themselves to eliminate the most ambitious project since the development of the space shuttle, particularly on the eve of the 25th anniversary of man’s landing on the moon.

“Don’t take the sparkle out of our children’s eyes,” Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) implored, as several other lawmakers invoked the spirits of Christopher Columbus and Lewis and Clark in arguing that the space station was truly pioneering research.

The loss of the space station project would have sent California’s already crippled aerospace and defense industries further reeling.

Two of the space station’s prime contractors--McDonnell Douglas and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park--together hold contracts worth more than $6 billion.

First announced with great fanfare by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1984, the space station has been the victim of continued redesigns and budget cuts almost ever since. Because of the delays, it has yet to begin construction. And one of its worst threats has been the yearly struggle for funds, experts have long complained.

“It’s bad for science to keep debating it,” Brown said, calling for an overwhelming vote of support not just for 1995 but for the future.

Gore said the House’s action “clears the way for a new era of space exploration and cooperation with our international partners, including Russia.”

“This signals the end of doubt about America’s commitment to space exploration,” the vice president said in a statement released after the vote.