Funding for Space Station Survives House Vote : Science: A bipartisan attempt to end the project fails, 278-155. The measure, which includes $2.1 billion to build an orbiting laboratory, now goes to the Senate.

The embattled space station project survived another brush with death when 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, calling it “half-baked science” and an “orbiting boondoggle” that already has 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 and 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 in the House on Wednesday night.

“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 in 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 siphoning off funds from other NASA projects.

But after heavy lobbying by the Clinton Administration, sufficient funds were recommended by appropriators and Brown gave the station his endorsement. The White House has called the space station as much a diplomatic tool as anything 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 seek support for the space station, and both he and President Clinton worked the phones Tuesday and Wednesday to convince wavering lawmakers.

But foes argued that the orbiting laboratory was taking up too many scarce tax dollars.

Rep. Nydia Vasquez (D-New York) 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 reeling further.

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 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.