Logic alert in Kathy Sawyer’s WaPo piece this morning on the new space initiative.

There are also serious unknowns about how, physically, the mandate will be carried out. There is no mention of money for a big rocket that could replace the shuttle’s heavy cargo-carrying capacity. One congressional space expert speculated that the development of such a vehicle might be taken out of NASA hands and given to the military or done in partnership with the commercial sector — a course that has led to multiple costly failures in the past with such experimental projects as the National Aerospace Plane and the X-33.

The implication is (I assume) that this isn’t a good approach, because it’s failed in the past.

Two problems.

First is a logical one–the implied conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. That is, even if this approach was followed in the past, and failed, one cannot conclude that all such approaches will fail. In order to determine that, we have to evaluate all of the factors that made it fail–we can’t simply assume that it was the approach itself that was flawed.

The second is that the premise itself is false. Neither NASP, nor X-33 used the approach described above. NASP wasn’t “taken out of NASA hands and handed over to the military”–it was a joint program between NASA and the Air Force. And X-33 wasn’t done “in partnership with the commercial sector,” because Lockheed Martin is not part of the commercial sector–it’s a government contractor. Lockmart hasn’t done anything commercial since the L-1011 fiasco, and their “business plan” for the Venture Star, the vehicle that was supposed to follow on from the X-33, was a joke, and a bad one, because it ended up costing the taxpayers a billion dollars.

NASP failed because it was a con job, a technical chimera initially foisted on DARPA by someone who was at best naive, and at worst a charlatan.

From neither case can we conclude that the concepts of either the military developing space vehicles, or commercial partnerships with the government, are in any way inherently flawed.