Yesterday's Opinion Journal had a piece by Ralph Peters on how the fact that we are now seeing more casualties in Afghanistan is a "good" thing.

While at first reading, such a statement sounds appalling, I agree, in the relative sense of the word "good." That the casualties have so far been low has possibly been an indicator that our war strategy has been insufficiently aggressive, and insufficiently...effective. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have killed some of our troops, and who we are now destroying, escaped from Tora Bora last fall, when we relied on Afghan troops to corral them, rather than putting our own at risk. Tragically, but necessarily, some of our own are dying now so that future others, perhaps in the thousands, or millions, many of them women and children, will live.

Risk-averse strategies can fail in many spheres--not just military campaigns. In the training and fitness industry, there's an old saying (crass though it may sound in the context of dedicated soldiers who will never come home to their families...) of "no pain, no gain."

And any competent financial analyst can describe the indisputable and inevitable relationship between risk and reward. That's why junk bonds pay a much higher interest rate than the debt of blue-chip stocks, or why startup firms offer a potentially much larger rate of return--with the corresponding chance that the entire investment may evaporate.

The same principle applies to research and development. Over the years, particularly since the Challenger disaster, NASA has become risk averse to the point of impotence. They will spend billions of taxpayer dollars in analysis, to avoid an outright and telegenic failure, even if the goal of the program itself is not achieved.

As an example, consider the X-34 program. It was supposed to produce a vehicle that would demonstrate the ability to fly hypersonically, reliably, as a major step on the way to affordable space access. (Unfortunately, NASA insisted that the contractor use an engine developed by NASA, which they later said was never intended to be a usable engine).

After the vehicle was mostly developed (minus the engine that the vehicle had been designed for, per NASA specifications), and NASA had a failure in a Mars mission, the agency decided that X-34 lacked sufficient redundancy and safety to fly. When they got an estimate of how much it would cost to add these (unnecessary) modifications to add the required redundancy, NASA decided instead to cancel the program.

Result? The vehicle never flew.

And the data obtained from it?

Zero.

All because NASA was unwilling to risk a failure of an experimental vehicle (the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a particular technology is viable or worth pursuing further).

If you want to know why only governments can afford spaceflight, seek no further than the outcome of this program...

I have heard rumors that the NASA X-34 program was just a smokescreen for the Defense Department to get a bunch of hypersonic research done by NASA engineers that would be applicable to the SR-71 replacement. The X-34 was never intended to be a working machine.

I would imagine the hypersonic data is being gathered by a working aircraft (perhaps a small fleet) built by the Defense Department and is being (or will be) shared with NASA.

If the rumor is correct, then this, while seeming to be a big waste of money, could concievably be a way to save quite a bit of money. I'd imagine that paying an engineer with top-secret clearance to do hypersonic wind tunnel tests is more expensive than having a NASA researcher do it.

Something to consider.

That sounds utterly implausible to me. In addition to the fact that there's very little cooperation between NASA and the Dod, there were no hypersonic wind tunnel tests necessary for the X-34 program, though there was probably extensive computational-fluid dynamics done on it at Ames.

But hypersonics is not classified--NASA does lots of it. What they don't do is actually fly vehicles. No, X-34 (and X-33 to an even larger degree) was just a total bureaucratic cockup.

Perhaps I'm not the best person to explain what I mean, as I just heard this mentioned casually. I used the 'wind tunnel' example because my memory of being told this is not so good. I'll send you some more information so you can get in touch with the person who told me.

"All because NASA was unwilling to risk a failure of an experimental vehicle (the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a particular technology is viable or worth pursuing further)."

Have you noticed that every time there is a less than successful ABM test at White Sands, a major portion of the criticism is exactly that? That the test failed, therefore all effort at developing an Anti-Ballastic Missle defence is doomed to fail. These people have the same problem that NASA seems to have-- they want zero risk in a world in which that is impossible. (Also, the critics neglect to note that maybe the purpose of the test is to fail, in order to callibrate what can succeed.)