This development has intriguing potential for space vehicle safety systems, if sufficiently light weight.

I'm sure that the capsule designers have heard of these "parachute" things before Rand.

I wasn't referring to capsule designers.

Didn't the X-38 basically have a whole-airframe parachute?

BRS has been supplying the chutes for smaller planes for ages now, their site has a bunch of videos of the saves that they have made, their site shows "205 lives saved" so far.
So now they are scaling up.
http://www.brsparachutes.com/default.aspx

by the way, wasnt Armadillo originally using BRS as well, when they did their crush cone nose first landing ?

If you remember the original design of the Gemini space craft had a para-sail and skids that deployed from the bottom of the spacecraft. This was to allow it to land on land, probably at Edwards. It was abandoned in favor of a water landing. If any of you have the old 1:24th scale model, take a look at the bottom there are places where the openings for the skids were supposed to be. The reason is that the model was based on early drawings and not on the actual flight hardware. I remember seeing artist conceptions of the para-sail landing years ago. They might be available on the internet, I have never looked.

That didn't take long,

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4002/images/fig32.jpg

here is a concept of the parasail landing. Was called a paraglider

That new single pilot VLJ (Eclipse?) uses an airframe chute. I think Moller is also using that for his Skycar.

For subsonic aircraft I'll take my individual emergency chute any day.
The whole airframe chute on the Cirrus SR20/22 has some severe limits on deployment speed.i.e lower than the normal cruise speed.
I'm not at all sure it would help after a mid air and loss of control. In the event of an engine fire it won't be a lot of help either.
Even after a successful deployment you have no control at all. Individual chutes are steerable and you just might be able to miss the high voltage power lines