SANTA CLARITA / ANTELOPE VALLEY : Funds to Refurbish Spy Planes May Be Cut : Defense: Congress moves to kill the $100-million project to spruce up three SR-71s. The result could affect up to 50 jobs at Lockheed’s plant in Palmdale.

Just a month after work began in Palmdale to refurbish three of the fabled SR-71 Air Force spy planes, the House of Representatives has moved to pull the funding rug out from under the $100-million project.

Last week, the House passed a supplemental spending bill that adds $2.5 billion to the Defense Department’s 1995 budget for international peacekeeping expenses but also takes money from a host of domestic and “low-priority” DOD programs already approved, including the refurbishment of the SR-71s.

If the supplemental bill becomes law and the program dies, it could affect up to 50 jobs at a Lockheed plant in Palmdale.

Congress originally appropriated the money for the refurbishment project at the behest of Sen. Robert Byrd (D--W.Va.), former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Pentagon officials, who wanted to develop a new, state-of-the-art spy plane, were strongly opposed, but Byrd believed the project would pressure the DOD to scale down its grand plans for a new plane, according to John Pike, director of military analysis at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit think tank that keeps tabs on military spending.

The $100 million allocated was enough to refurbish three of the SR-71s, but not enough to deploy them for more than a few weeks, Pike said.

“After you spend all the money on reactivation, you run out of money to run the thing,” he said.

An Appropriations Committee staffer who asked that his name not be used confirmed that the current project calls for the planes to go into service Sept. 1, 1996, and go out of service 30 days later.

Another problem with redeploying the spy planes, according to the staffer, is that foreign bases once used as the plane’s staging areas are now either off-limits or closed.

But at Lockheed Plant 42 in Palmdale, where several workers had been recalled from layoffs to work on the SR-71 project, the program was greatly welcomed. Just what will happen to these employees depends on “the terms and timing” of a funding decision, according to Jim Ragsdale, spokesman for Lockheed Advanced Development Corp.

“We’d have to hear from the military in terms of what do they want us to do and when do they want us to do it before we’d know,” Ragsdale said.

Lockheed was the original designer and builder of the SR-71, which was developed in the early 1960s. Capable of flying faster than three times the speed of sound (about 2,100 m.p.h.), the SR-71 is the fastest and highest-flying jet-powered aircraft in the world.

About 30 of the spy planes were built. The Air Force retired the last half-dozen of them in its inventory in 1989, under a push by then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney to move the DOD into satellite reconnaissance.

But the department decided it still needed airborne reconnaissance--as opposed to satellite coverage, which provides pictures only intermittently--when surveillance shortfalls cropped up during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Pike said.

Byrd’s office did not offer a comment on the matter. Pike said the senator may fight the bid to rescind the spending, but “he’s got a lot of other fish to fry and he’s not in the majority party anymore.”

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Peter Roberson writes for States News Service.