Peter F Hamilton addressed this in one of his novels; one of the Commonwealth Saga books I think.
Essentially, his imagined industry uses solar energy to melt ores; these are then formed into a metallic foam and shaped into a stable aerodynamic shape (a sort of blunt wedge).
They are then deorbited to land far out to sea.
Because it's metallic foam, it has a high drag-to-weight ratio (hence lower terminal velocity) and it floats.
Some of the ore is lost to ablation during re-entry, but ... so what? There's plenty more where it came from.
It wasn't the Commonwealth Saga, it was the Night's Dawn series, and I was wondering if someone else would mention it. It's pretty resource-intensive, but we're talking about freaking asteroid mining, so the woo-woo SF aspects of it suddenly feel a little more plausible.
Essentially, his imagined industry uses solar energy to melt ores; these are then formed into a metallic foam and shaped into a stable aerodynamic shape (a sort of blunt wedge).
They are then deorbited to land far out to sea.
Because it's metallic foam, it has a high drag-to-weight ratio (hence lower terminal velocity) and it floats.
Some of the ore is lost to ablation during re-entry, but ... so what? There's plenty more where it came from.