Remember the Phoenix landing?  Remember the media events and the part that made it all exciting enough to Fox and CNN to break away from their inside reports of Britney's lunch menu?

EDL, a.k.a. "Six (sometimes called Seven) Minutes of Terror"

It a big deal to land something on a planet, gravity and atmosphere are the combined enemy.  

But I keep scratching my head on this...   Mars' gravity is less than that of Earth's and Mars' atmosphere is thinner than that of Earth's.   That should have been relatively easy (unless the whole point was to over-state the "terror" in  order to get coverage, people don't  love NASCAR because there is a 100% safety record).

So if it's minutes of Terror with everyone involved biting their nails off and fireworks and tears of joy when it actually succeeds ... isn't it far worse getting stuff down to Earth?

For the most part, the going and established workaday Earth reentry system seen on the The Apollo/Orion and Soyuz and Space Shuttle mission enders, use those wonderful heat sheilds. that, like judo fighters,  take the heat fully and flake off rather than trying to brute force resist the damaging effects.

And we seem to do a pretty good job of it... with our relatively small reentry crafts and hyper alert teams of hundreds and per vehicle rates in the upper millions.

But ... what if we actually wanted to make a business of payload reentry, with commercial level  volumes? Like so many folks say "AstroBusiness" is all about, making or mining stuff out there and bringing it down here for use. 

The Space Shuttle cargo bays are all but museum pieces.  And now we're back to Apollo, or actually Soyuz style flaking and parachutes and smashdowns in deserts.

That just doesn't scale. 

Seems everyone is all about SSTO and getting the cost of launch down (and far as I can tell nothing is budging the needle), or more into the cool fun of designing stuff to zip around between the orbs.  But, is it me or is there a Back Hole that sucks up everyone's mind when it comes to options for commercially useful payload volume return?

I'm a pretty good Googler, but I'm not finding anyone who's interested.

Well, except maybe for it being a side benefit of JP Aerospace hopes.  And you have to read that book to get the gist of if it.

Of course... we haven't heard much from Bezos in a long time, and for sure he's got an interest in large volume shipping.  But then again you'd think a website guy would at least have his site copyright notice updated once a year.