My point is that it's less a question of technical difficulty / tolerance, but more fuel / delta-v / mass cost. In the case of a bat swing, to bat the ball fas

My point is that it's less a question of technical difficulty / tolerance, but more fuel / delta-v / mass cost. In the case of a bat swing, to bat the ball faster, your muscles need to be stronger, and the ball and bat need to withstand greater pressures. In the case of a vehicle travelling through space / thin atmosphere, it only needs more fuel to burn to slow it down. Analogously, you don't parallel park a car from 70mph, having travelled somewhere on a highway. Here's a graph a booster's speed over time, showing the reentry burn: https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFYIh.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFYIh.png ( from https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20246/what-is-this-debris-on-the-crs-10-reentry-at-t630 https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20246/what-is-this... )