Clinton Support Expected for Space Station

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton has decided to push for construction of a sophisticated, orbiting space laboratory that would make use of much of the technology already developed for the controversial space station Freedom, congressional aides said Tuesday.

Clinton all but announced his intentions at a Tuesday press conference, taking pains to highlight the project’s virtues as he spoke to reporters. The President promised a formal statement on the project within a few days.

“I do think it’s important for us to recognize that the space station offers us the potential of working with other nations and continuing our lead in a very important area and having a significant technological impact,” the President said.

“In the aftermath of all the cutbacks in defense and what they mean for science and technology, (the space station program) is something that we should, in my judgment, consider very carefully.”

During a Monday meeting with the top congressional backers of the project, Vice President Al Gore and White House Science Adviser John Gibbons strongly suggested that the President had decided to proceed with the program, sources told The Times.

“I think the crisis has passed about what the design will look like,” said a top aide to one of those who was present. “I think the real debate now will be over where the money will come from, because all the designs are over budget.”

Among those who attended the meeting were Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, the committee that oversees the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its programs; Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA; and Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), Mikulski’s counterpart in the House.

The future of the space station program is being watched closely in Orange County, home to one of the space station’s three prime contractors--the McDonnell Douglas space systems unit in Huntington Beach. The company holds space station contracts valued at more than $4 billion and has 3,000 employees working, directly and indirectly, on the project.

At the press conference, Clinton also embraced a call for dramatic changes in the way NASA manages its major projects, endorsing the findings of a 16-member panel of aerospace industry experts that reviewed the space station program.

Among other things, the experts called for streamlining space station management and cutting by 30% the number of NASA and private contractor employees assigned to the project.

The panel, Clinton said, made “some very provocative . . . recommendations and suggestions about how not only this project should be dealt with, but about how NASA should operate . . . and proceed.”

Those recommendations could dramatically affect McDonnell Douglas, especially if NASA adopts the panel’s proposal to name a single prime contractor to continue work on the space station program. Company spokesman Thomas E. Williams was not available for comment Tuesday.

Congressional sources predicted that Clinton will recommend some combination of two of the three options for continuing the space station program that were presented to the White House last week by the panel of experts.

Both alternatives, known as Option A and Option B, are based largely on the space station design and engineering program under way at NASA since President Ronald Reagan first announced the program in 1984.

Clinton is likely to reject a third, less expensive plan, Option C, that represents a dramatic departure from the earlier space station work and which has been widely criticized on Capitol Hill, congressional sources said.

“As a practical matter, it is not clear that either Option A or Option B is so well-defined that six months from now one would be able to tell the difference,” said John Pike, who heads the space policy project for the Federation of American Scientists.

But congressional critics have vowed to fight to kill the space station, arguing that the nation can ill afford the program and that its scientific value has been compromised by attempts to cut costs.

A House vote is scheduled within the next week on a NASA authorization bill that would provide $1.9 billion a year for the space station over six years. That would not be enough money to complete the program within the eight-year schedule outlined by NASA.

The expert panel’s report was based on a three-month design review ordered by Clinton last spring in an effort to pare its budget. While not endorsing a specific plan, the space experts said they preferred one that was simpler than the Option B outlined by the NASA redesign team.