What was going on when I was born?

The astronauts flying the space shuttle Columbia were ordered today to cut short their mission and prepare to bring the troubled craft back to a landing tomorrow afternoon in the desert of California. Col. Joe H. Engle of the Air Force and Capt. Richard H. Truly of the Navy plan to steer the winged spaceship to a touchdown at 4:22 P.M., Eastern standard time. Until one of the craft's three fuel cells failed after liftoff yesterday, the mission was supposed to last five days, ending next Tuesday. Now it is scheduled to end after two days, six hours and 12 minutes. 'Prudent Thing to Do' Christopher C. Kraft Jr., director of the Johnson Space Center here, said at a news conference this afternoon that the decision to curtail the flight was ''the prudent thing to do at this point'' in testing the world's first re-usable space vehicle.

Mayor Koch said today that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority should consider hiring private companies to do routine repair work on New York City's subways and buses. John D. Simpson said in New York that the agency already contracted out much work to private companies, though he was interested in expanding the program. Mr. Simpson is president of the Transit Authority, the M.T.A. subsidiary that operates the buses and subways. Mayor Koch, in Puerto Rico to address a group of brokers, was critical of the authority and its workers. ''The question today,'' he said, ''is management and how you get the people who work for the system to work. Management is as much to blame as the workers.''

The Social Security Administration has fallen badly behind in recording the earnings of millions of workers since 1978. The lag has raised the possibility that at least some workers may lose retirement benefits because they have not been fully credited for their earnings. Since retirement benefits and Medicare coverage are based on past earnings, an error or omission in someone's earnings record could imperil future benefits. As a precaution, the Social Security Administration recommends that people periodically ask the agency for a statement of the wages credited to their account.

Thirty-two Republican senators today rallied to the support of David A. Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. But many other legislators expressed a belief that his effectiveness in presenting the President's economic recovery program had been permanently impaired by the publication of remarks in which Mr. Stockman cast doubts on parts of the program. In a letter to President Reagan, the senators said, ''In his role as O.M.B. director, David Stockman was crucial to the passage of Phase 1 of the Reagan program. ''We need him as part of the team as we work on Phase 2,'' the letter said, ''and we fully support your decision to keep David Stockman as a member of your economic team.''

Adm. Hyman G. Rickover will leave his post as the Navy's chief nuclear officer in January, on the orders of President Reagan, ending a 63-year career in which he brought a sometimes reluctant Navy into the nuclear age. The Secretary of the Navy, John F. Lehman Jr., announced the change at a news conference today, explaining. ''Now is the time to begin an orderly transition to a younger man.'' The admiral, who will be 82 years old in January, became a Washington institution whose durability and influence rivaled that of J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, the Director of Selective Service, and General of the Army Douglas A. MacArthur.

Leaders of private charities say they will not be able to meet President Reagan's challenge to raise enough money for the needy and provide enough volunteers to offset cuts in Federal social programs - at least, not any time soon. Foundations, United Way organizations and other nonprofit agencies, they say, have so integrated their giving with programs and grants of the Federal Government that they are having to completely revamp their patterns of making contributions. With no hope of making up the deficit left by the Federal cuts, some of which took effect Oct. 1, the beginning of the 1982 fiscal year, they say they are having to make hard choices of whether to support, for instance, a symphony orchestra or a soup kitchen. For the most part, those decisions have not yet been made. 'Turn From Government' Is Urged Throughout his campaign and in his Presidency, Mr. Reagan has argued that much of the social assistance of the Federal Government could be taken over by volunteers and philanthropy. In a televised address this fall, kicking off nationwide United Way drives, the President said he was ''counting on voluntary strength as we turn from Government doing for us that which we can best do for ourselves.''

New discoveries at an archeological site in Kenya appear to push back by almost a million years the first use of fire by the ancestors of modern humans. Until now, the earliest strong evidence of fire had been in association with a very few sites such as that at Zhoukoudian, China, dated about 500,000 years ago. The new finds in Kenya are estimated to be 1,400,000 years old. The use of fire is the quintessence of the human condition, even more so than the use of tools, since some animals at least use sticks as primitive tools but only man uses fire.

The White House said today that the Justice Department was investigating a $1,000 cash payment received by President Reagan's national security adviser, Richard V. Allen, from a Japanese magazine that interviewed Nancy Reagan on Jan. 21. The investigation came to light after a Japanese newspaper reported that authorities in Japan had completed an inquiry, at the request of the United States Government, into charges that an aide to President Reagan had received bribes. The aide was not identified. The newspaper, the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, said today that the American official had been given the $1,000 by the magazine publisher for arranging the interview with Mrs. Reagan. (Page 4.)

In all, perhaps a half-million demonstrators have marched this fall in Rome, Milan, Venice and many smaller cities against the stationing of nuclear weapons in Italy. The dimension and nature of the marches came as a surprise to the political parties that normally direct and control every facet of Italy's political life. The parties found themselves bypassed and overtaken by an amorphous coming together of antiwar activists, opponents of nuclear weapons, ecologists, feminists, conscientious objectors, religious groups, youth organizations and leftists with conflicting political affiliations. This was something new on the Italian political scene - a mass expression of genuine pacifism that seemed to be different from the anti-Americanism of the protests during the Vietnam War and cold war.

Michael Foot, the leader of the Labor Party, abandoned his effort to conciliate Tony Benn, the leader of its left wing, and bitterly denounced him today. Mr. Foot's outspoken condemnation of his party colleague, a highly unusual political act, increased the probability of further wrangling in the badly divided opposition party at a time when its leaders wish they could concentrate their energy on attacking the Conservative Government. The criticism was welcome news for Britain's new Social Democratic Party, which is rapidly gaining ground in the ideological center with defections from Labor.

Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, after a stopover in Yugoslavia, arrived here today for an ''official visit of friendship'' and was greeted at the airport by President Nicolae Ceausescu, the official press agency reported. Mr. Mugabe told reporters before leaving Belgrade that he had reached agreement with officials there on military cooperation and on assistance in road construction, farming, mining and other projects in Zimbabwe.

Some 50 leftist legislators in West Germany's ruling Social Democratic Party have written to Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, criticizing Moscow's military policies. The legislators, many of them critical of Western rearmament plans, expressed concern over the size of Soviet conventional forces and Moscow's deployment of SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles.