SPACE STATION'S CRITICS MUST CONSIDER ALTERNATIVES.

Byline: Linda Billings

THE international space station project is under fire once again, thanks to Russia's economic woes and political shortsightedness. But we need the project to promote international cooperation and to hasten nuclear disarmament.

Russia is a major partner in the space station project. NASA, lead partner in the project, pays Russia for its contributions, and Russia needs more dollars - about half a billion - to meet its obligations. Russia recently agreed to give up all its research time on the space station to NASA in exchange for $60 million. Congress is balking at giving NASA more money, and some say it may be time to cut Russia loose.

President Reagan proposed the space station project in 1984, inviting the Canadian, European and Japanese space agencies to participate. White House officials promised Congress that the space station would cost U.S. taxpayers no more than $8 billion to complete and would be in orbit by 1992. NASA exceeded this amount in the first few years of the project, and Congress has been complaining about ballooning costs ever since.

Critics are right to fault the space station project for a history of cost overruns, schedule delays and fuzzy rationale. The U.S. General Accounting Office now estimates that the project will cost taxpayers $96 billion through the end of its 10-year operating life.

But while the space station started out as an overblown aerospace ``workfare'' program, it has since acquired a larger role as a foreign policy and national security tool. For this reason, Congress is wrong to stand in its way.

In 1993, President Clinton asked Russia to join the space station project. The rationale was that Russian participation would reduce NASA's costs. Perhaps more important, the reasoning also was that paying Russia to build space station components could help to shore up Russia's anemic economy, aid the development of a free market economy and divert its aerospace industry from making weapons.

In preparing for the meeting that yielded a space station cooperation agreement, U.S. and Russian officials reached ``a key understanding,'' as one White House official has described it, that Russia would abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime.

Soon after, Ukraine signed a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the United States. Ukraine's aerospace industry got a job building space station hardware, and a Ukrainian astronaut got to fly on the space shuttle.

Some members of Congress have opposed Russian participation from the beginning, first arguing that the United States should not trust its former enemy and now protesting that giving Russia money is like throwing it away. But though the space station project suffers from a bloated budget, a stretched-out schedule and troubles with a major partner, it does not necessarily follow that the project is not worth the taxpayers' investment: Compare the $96 billion price tag to the $5.8 trillion the U.S. government invested in nuclear weapons programs from 1940 to 1996.

Russian participation has not caused the space station's price tag to rise from $8 billion to $96 billion. The price would be higher if Russia had not agreed to launch many space station components originally planned for much more expensive launches on NASA's space shuttle.

If Congress is so worried about cost overruns, it could take a harder look at NASA's space station contractors, led by Boeing, who have been raking in the lion's share of project spending.

Though administration officials claim the president is funding the space station mainly for its scientific and technical value, the project is now part of a larger effort to make the world safer. For U.S. taxpayers, cooperation and partnerships with other nations are a better deal than the competition, conflict and budget-breaking weapons buildup that characterized the Cold War.

We can choose to live in a world of war or a world of peace. We can sincerely commit to speeding nuclear nonproliferation, or we can be hypocrites and spend more money on new and needless weapons of mass destruction. The choice is ours.