Space Station Receives Key Funding Vote : Aerospace: House committee authorizes funds to complete project, which supports 1,000-plus O.C. jobs.

The International Space Station and its thousands of California jobs received a major boost Wednesday when the House Science Committee authorized all funds needed to complete the station by 2002.

In a strong bipartisan showing, the panel ignored warnings of huge costs in the future and voted 34 to 8 to spend $13.1 billion on the NASA project, which supports more than 1,000 Orange County jobs. The bill now moves to the House floor.

Touting the scientific research that will be derived from experiments in weightless space, proponents sought the long-term funding to demonstrate to international partners, including Russia and Japan, a commitment to finish the project.

The move also will bring stability to a program that has faced termination each budget year because of cost overruns in the early stages of the program, its sponsors said. Originally budgeted at $8 billion, the project’s costs have exceeded $11 billion.

Citing a recent report by the General Accounting Office that set the price tag at $93.9 billion during the next 17 years, including costs to launch, maintain and operate the space shuttle that will work with the station, Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Colo.) tried to kill the project outright.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) responded, “I think that your arguments would have swayed me 10 years ago. I think that today, after so much has been committed to this project, after so much of our . . . national prestige and our word internationally has been given, that backing out now would actually be more costly.”

Some Democrats lost a vote to tie the station’s seven-year funding to minimum budget guarantees for the entire NASA program. They fear that the project will be funded at the expense of lower-profile NASA efforts.