After reading about the 50th Anniversary of NASA at Kottke I stumbled across information about the new Orion Space vehicle.
My thoughts:
After searching around their site and reading up on the new Orion capsule I found it a little strange that they were going back to the old school way of designing the crew cabin (looking just like the Apollo capsules but 2.5x bigger). The one thing that seemed to really stick out was how they now have to go backwards in terms of landing this thing. I always felt that one of the real advances over the last 40 or so years was being able to land their shuttles on a runway instead of dropping their astronauts in the ocean and then sort of bobbing for apples.
I tried to poke around to see if this has been addressed, and all I was able to find was an article from Dec 2007:
http://www.universetoday.com/2007/12/10/water-or-land-the-orion-landing-choice/
Seems this thing may be capable of landing on ground but with almost a ton of extra cargo. So after 50 years they have almost completely reverted to their original design AND execution!