But since the basic idea of an inflatable braking system does tend to work what if they reshapped it to form a lifting body and gave the craft a little control for the possibility to stay up in the atmosphere for a longer period. Thus shedding more speed before the chute deploys for landing.

Its their second stage that they are thinking of recovering from an orbital speed. But I don’t think they have finalized any plans or designs on it yet.

That is why Fred K suggested using rockets to slow the craft before reentry or before parachute deployment.

Now that you mention it, I noticed that JPL stopped using Hohmann Transfer Orbits to get to Mars (minimum energy required to reach the second orbit). This transfer orbit would reach Mars orbit, but the spacecraft would be travelling much slower than Mars, making for a large relative velocity. Does anyone know whether JPL’s modern, faster transfer orbit results in a lower relative velocity between the spacecraft and Mars?

I also think that Fred may be in error about Falcon 9 showing that rockets can be used during reentry, because Falcon 9 didn’t exactly reenter from orbit but from a suborbital trajectory. It didn’t go through a dramatic, ionizing, heat-shield-requiring, hard-to-fire-your-retrograde-rockets reentry.

Then the entry speed might just be a little slower.

I’m sure the smart engineers at JPL / Hughes have looked at the trade of weight of fuel for propulsive decel vs. parachute weight.

Even if propellent weight is a bit more, it could easily end up being much, much less expensive, and much, much less risky to use propulsive decel.

I recall hearing several JPL employee declare that it was “impossible” to use propulsive decel in the atmosphere during entry. This has now been proven incorrect by the F9R.