@shannonmstirone It’s an interesting question! I had some fun thinking about it. If you had a rocket to slow you down enough to enter into the atmosphere, then a bow wave (a shockwave) would form in front of you, just like the bow waves in front of these stars flying through thin gas. 
@shannonmstirone 2/ These shock waves are where the gas slams to a sudden stop so the gas is super hot inside the shock wave. So it radiates infrared radiation. At first this infrared doesn’t hurt you because the gas is so thin there isn’t much there to create the radiation. But...
@shannonmstirone 3/ As you descend into thicker and thicker atmosphere the amount of infrared radiation keeps increasing. Eventually it feels like you are sitting too close to a bonfire. Your spacesuit tries to keep you cool but it wasn’t designed with enough insulation so you will cook to death.
@shannonmstirone 4/ However, you might die from something else first. The heat on your suit causes the rubber and plastic seals to get soft. Eventually they start to leak. You are still too high so the outside pressure is near zero. So you might die of hypoxia before you die of heat.
@shannonmstirone 5/ Eventually the heat is so high the materials in the suit will ablate or “burn up” the same as a shooting star. It isn’t really burning. It is just that the molecules are falling apart because molecular bonds can exist only at much lower energies than the thermal vibrations.
@shannonmstirone 6/ So a key issue in designing a reentry spacecraft is to manage the infrared radiation coming from the plasma in the shockwave with insulation. And keep the flow going smoothly around you so the shockwave stays cooler and creates the minimum radiation. If you do that, then...
@shannonmstirone 7/ You get to much thicker air and you have slowed down so much that it isn’t really very hot any more. The air isn’t radiating back at you any more. Then you just need to slow down somehow before hitting the ground.
