Do you have to wear a heat-shield, just like those re-entry vehicles had when astronauts came back down?
More like a surf board that the astronaut rides through the atmosphere.
;)
Re-entering from low earth orbit? Of course you do, silly! And the team has already come up with a revolutionary design for a personal heat shield. Here is a photo taken during recent R&D proof-of-concept testing:
Notice the cool-blue color which is designed to absorb all the re-entry heat. No ablation needed.
“Do you have to wear a heat-shield, just like those re-entry vehicles had when astronauts came back down?”
The need for a form of heat shield is dependent upon whether or not you are returning to the Earth’s atmosphere from deep space, low Earth Orbit (LEO), or the altitude and ballistic trajectory of a sub-orbital flight. The linked video in the article is somewhat unscientific in a few respects, but it presupposes the space diver ascended into a sub-orbital ballistic flight aboard a rocket propelled vehicle and jumped at the apex with a near zero miles per hour speed relative to the Earth. This would allow the space diver to avoid the tremendous speeds through the atmosphere a space diver would encounter when deorbiting with a speed relative to the Earth of greater than 16,000 miles per hour.
A space diver deorbiting from a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth must decrease speed from more than 16,000 miles per hour to around 200 miles per hour or less before reentry into that part of the Earth’s atmosphere capable of generating significant aerodynamic forces upon the space diver’s body.
The same is true of an astronaut or space diver returning to the Earth’s atmosphere from deep space. The space diver must decelerate the speed from around 24,000 miles per hour or greater down to about 200 miles per hour before encountering aerodynamic pressures capable of disintegrating the space diver’s body.
One of the proposed methods for an astronaut or space diver to decelerate from orbital or greater speeds is to use a heat shield type device to skip off the surface of the atmosphere like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond to shed speed. This is sometimes depicted in fiction as a form of atmospheric surfing.