HUNTINGTON BEACH : Russian Space Chief Tours Southland

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), well-known anti-communist and onetime Soviet basher, took a major step this week toward international cooperation.

He and Yuri Koptev, general director of the Russian Space Agency, bellied up to the bar at a country and Western spot in Santa Ana, and the congressman bought the erstwhile communist his first tequila.

“This is very symbolic,” Rohrabacher told reporters on Monday, the day after his effort at cocktail diplomacy. “Ten years ago I was Yuri’s worst nightmare--as anti-communist as I could be. Today I’m telling you that it’s time to get over the Cold War mentality and try to cook up some deals.”

The “deals” in question consist of the heretofore unprecedented exchange of technology and information between the former Soviet Union and the United States in the field of space exploration.

That was the major topic of discussion Monday as Koptev, accompanied by Rohrabacher and others, kicked off a five-day tour of Southern California aerospace facilities with a visit to the McDonnell Douglas plant in Huntington Beach.

“My presence here would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Koptev said at a press conference held in front of a mock-up of a NASA space station being developed by the company. “This proves that we have stopped being enemies and are becoming friends.”

Part of what these new friends have to offer, according to McDonnell Douglas spokeswoman Anne McCauley, is special experience and expertise in such areas as materials, advanced mathematics, space systems and extended manned spaceflight.

In cooperating with the Russians, McCauley said, aerospace companies can lower their costs by eliminating the need to repeat research and development already accomplished by their former enemies.

“They’ve got some strengths and we’ve got some strengths,” McCauley said, adding that the company has already entered into an agreement to share technology with one research institute in Moscow. “We’re starting out slow, just examining what may be to our benefit and to their benefit.”

During the press conference, Koptev pointed out several potential areas of U.S.-Russian cooperation, including the planned November, 1993, participation of a Russian cosmonaut in a space shuttle flight and possible use of a Soyuz space capsule as a “lifeboat” in future missions.

McCauley said it was too early to tell whether cooperation with the Russians would have any impact on the economic situation at McDonnell Douglas, which recently announced the elimination of more than 250 jobs in Orange County.

“This is a whole new ballgame for us,” she said. “We’re still in the investigative process.”

Organizers of the tour, which was paid for by an American inventor, said they hoped it marked the first of many such exchanges.

The visiting Russian space administrator spent Monday morning being briefed by McDonnell Douglas personnel on the status of various projects.

Later he toured the company’s mock-up of Space Station Freedom and visited TRW in El Segundo.

Stops scheduled for later in the week include a Rockwell facility in Palmdale, a Hughes facility in El Segundo and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

But the tour’s high point, observers said, occurred on Sunday when, in addition to the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, Koptev visited Disneyland.

“His favorite attraction,” Rohrabacher reported, “was the dancing bears.”