Frequent commenter “Habitat Hermit,” commenting on my Space Show appearance on Sunday, wrote:

There’s still plenty of room for disagreements –I have some myself (perhaps even a big one when it comes to capsules although it depends on the details, I think they’ve still got lots of more or less unexplored potential…

I agree that there are lots of interesting concepts for capsules and their recovery modes. But that’s beside the point. The reason that I don’t like capsules, of any form, is quite simple. They imply that the only part of the vehicle (at least the upper stage of it) that returns is the capsule. Hence they imply at least a partially, if not fully expendable launch system. I don’t believe that we are going to seriously open up space by continuing to throw hardware away.