Bonus points if you design the glider in such a way that it is covered in some sort of ablative material that helps mitigate climate change after it burns off keeping the mined material from doing so to maximize material return.
This is an interesting idea. I initially assumed you’d just structure your payload (eg titanium) to ablate during reentry.
But maybe you can do something better with carbonaceous asteroids, or simply with regolith, to produce a cheap ablative shield. I suppose the problem would be with the changes to aerodynamic profile during reentry - but perhaps regolith tiles could be manufactured to ablate in a consistent-enough pattern?
