Is it actually possible to de-orbit without over-heating?

If you come in at some super shallow angle you'd think you could do it, but at some point one ends up going from an orbit to a trajectory, at which point unless your air resistance can throttle your air speed below some value, you'll always over-heat?

I suppose if you had some kind of aero-gel bubble that could progressively ablate as you came down you could make it work.

Bleeding off 8km/second (5miles/second) all the way to zero movement - just by moving through the atmosphere... doing that without heating just seems impossible.

If arbitrary thrust is allowed you can move as slowly as you like in any direction.

Yes. Look up space diving. There have been old Popular Science (Popular Mechanics?) articles on it and speculation in the space community about a new sport if/when a space tether is possible.

> No successful space dives (above 100 km) have been completed to date