You can't do stuff like:
if [ "$SPACE" < "$TEST" ]
At least not sensibly. " < $TEST" is used to redirect the input of the test command to the file called $TEST. Since test does not use an input file, this does nothing. This is one of several dozen reason why you should switch to:
if [[ whatever ]]
Not only would < do what you wanted it to, but then you no longer need the quotes around the variables.