Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 20, 1995 TAG: 9505220042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The plan would cut about 28,000 civil service and contractor positions, trim and restructure the work force at each of 10 NASA centers, and start a process that eventually would put operation of the space shuttle under control of private industry.
Administrator Daniel Goldin said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was ``willing to do our part'' in meeting President Clinton's call for reducing space costs by $5 billion over five years. But he angrily denounced Republican plans to reduce NASA's budget even further.
``We've taken the appropriate cuts without complaining,'' the administrator said at a news conference. Any further reductions would sap ``the vitality of the agency'' and Goldin vowed: ``I'll fight the added cuts proposed on Capitol hill.''
If the new plan is approved, NASA's civil service corps would be reduced from 21,060 to 17,500, about the size of the agency in 1961 when America was just beginning the space race. It would also reduce NASA contractor jobs by about 25,000 positions nationwide.
The new plan is the latest in a series of painful self-examinations by NASA. Goldin last year led a NASA effort to trim the space budget by $35 billion over five years. But the Clinton administration ordered even more austerity and told Goldin to plan on an annual agency budget of $13 billion by 2000, down more than $1 billion from the current budget.
The added cuts were made without closing any centers or canceling major programs.
And then, last week, Republicans in Congress said the agency should be trimmed even further and called for an $11 billion budget by 2002.
That, Goldin said Friday, is going too far.
``If those cuts go through, all bets are off,'' he said. ``We will have to consider shutting down a combination of enterprises, programs and centers.
Under the new plan, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., would take the hardest hit.
The plan calls for closing Moffett Field, home of Ames' experimental and scientific fleet of aircraft, and a transfer of the airplanes to Dryden Flight Research Center, the only NASA center to actually gain in the shakeup.
Virtually all of NASA's far-flung fleet of aircraft would be shifted to Dryden.
Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., would lose 200 civil service jobs and 800 contractor jobs.
Work forces at Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., each would be reduced by more than 30 percent, with some key activities at both centers being shifted elsewhere.
At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Goldin said, a plan to streamline launching and maintaining of the space shuttle and other work would lead to a 25 percent reduction in work force, a loss of 1,150 civil servants and 2,000 contractors.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston would absorb a 21 percent hit but retain most aspects of the site's major jobs: training astronauts and controlling shuttle flights.
Goldin said early plans are under way to pass operation of the space shuttle into the control of a single contractor. Details of this shift still are being worked out.
But Goldin repeatedly pledged that the agency ``would not sacrifice safety'' in space flight in order to save money.
by CNB