Heh that's an interesting point. It doesn't have to orbit the Earth, so it doesn't necessarily have lots of lateral velocity to burn off. It'd be interesting to work the numbers for just matching the Earth's velocity around the sun, at a distance of a few hundred kilometers.

Edit: based on a quick chat with Claude Sonnet, reentry velocity would be about a fourth as high, but getting to that initial orbit in the first place makes the whole project significantly harder. But maybe if ablation from reentries became an environmental problem, and deep-space propulsion got really good, it'd be worthwhile.