It takes a monumental amount of energy to send a space vehicle into orbit. That energy might be reclaimed on descent but every ounce sent into orbit is horrendously expensive and any extra equipment that might reclaim any energy weighs a lot. It's not worth the expense or trouble or endangerment of the returning astronauts.

Ahh, true. But say that it didnt come right down. This is an Atmosphere Surfer. It can stay up there long enough to recharge the batteries, and then instead of coming down, use alittle power and go back up into space where a shuttle, or a Space Station can collect the charged batteries, and then send the Surfer back into another "Burn Wave" until it not only recharges itself, but every battery as well. And this could all be done Automatically by a preset flight plan with a computer. The Space Station could use the energy for itself, or for other ships that dont have solar panels, and need a recharge.

In an orbiting vehicle height equals energy. If you put energy in to gain height then the energy you recoup by coming down will be less than the energy put in to gain the height since the process is not 100% efficient. You gain nothing.

Sand is right, but maybe I can explain it more clearly. The space shuttle has a lot of kinetic due to the fact that it orbits at over 17,000 MPH. It also has a lot of potential energy due to its very high altitude. The kinetic and potential energy the shuttle has at orbit originally came from the rocket motors that lifted it to that high altitude and accelerated it to that high velocity. As the shuttle decends, it uses atmospheric drag to convert the kinetic and potential energy into heat. So all that heat during reentry was supplied by the rockets. At best you could only reclaim some of the energy that you used to put it up.

OTOH, if you could devise a way to collect and store some of that energy, it could theoretically reduce the need for heat shielding. I've seen a few ideas to do that, but I don't think any of them are being seriously considered.

So if its the energy needed to regain the altittude thats ruling out whatever it gathered, why not have it skip out of the atmosphere instead? Gravity could do the work if you hit it just right. The shuttle now has to hit it just right so that it dont skip out or burn up.

OTOH, you'd have to get a running start to gain some momentum, and that alone could kill anything you may of collected, unless you could, say set up some kind of running track between the earth and the moon to slingshot back and forth, but thats just kinda out there.

Skipping off the atmosphere will not gain you any energy. After the skip, the ship will have lost energy to atmospheric drag and so will not regain its previous speed and altitute. It could possibly achieve one or the other, but not both. Thus, it will eventually fall out of orbit.

If you slingshot around the Moon, you can gain energy. The energy comes from slowing the Moon slightly. Some of the kinetic energy of the Moon gets transfered to the ship, which accelerates the ship and decelerates the Moon. Of course, the mass of the Moon is so much greater than the ship that the deceleration is negligible. However, this method of gaining energy is impractical for providing energy to people on the Earth. Though, as you probably know, it is useful for accelerating spaceships.

In stead of using parachutes to slow down the descending sattelite we can use wind turbines above it to collect back the energy.

Something almost like that was attempted in the 90's. It was called the Roton. However, it didn't collect the energy from the rotor. It would have made sense, being that it used the rotor like a helicopter for landing. It used tip jets to power the rotor. It would have been logical to store up energy during decent and use the stored power for landing. I suspect tip jets/fuel would be lighter than generator/batteries. Maybe a flywheel would work, but it might be heavier than tipjets too. Anyway, the Roton never flew. It was single-stage-to-orbit, which may have been its downfall. Maybe this idea would work on a two-stage system.