You want to use re.split() in that case, with a group:
re.split(r'(\s+)', line)
would return both the columns and the whitespace so you can rejoin the line later with the same amount of whitespace included.
Example:
>>> re.split(r'(\s+)', line)
['BBP1', ' ', '0.000000', ' ', '-0.150000', ' ', '2.033000', ' ', '0.00', ' ', '-0.150', ' ', '1.77']
You probably do want to remove the newline from the end.