Lightweight objects that experience more drag start slowing down at a higher altitude, where the air density is lower. Since the air is so thin, it doesn’t heat the object as efficiently, and although the reentry takes longer, peak temperatures can be much lower. In fact, calculations by Justin Atchison and Mason Peck have shown that an object shaped like a sheet of paper, curved to fall flat side first, could in theory enter the atmosphere “softly” without ever reaching especially high temperatures.

If you print your message on a sheet of baking parchment paper, aluminum foil, or some other thin and lightweight material that can survive being warmed up, you might just be able to toss it out the door as is. As long as it’s shaped right, it could make it to the ground intact. In fact, a team of Japanese researchers planned to try this by launching paper airplanes from the ISS. They designed the planes to survive the heat and pressure of reentry, but, sadly, the project never went through.

A package tossed by hand from the ISS will descend gradually over the course of many orbits, with little control over the eventual landing point. Controlling where the package will land is much harder than simply delivering it to Earth.

Returning spacecraft generally try to control where they land. Some do this with more precision than others. SpaceX’s spent rocket boosters can guide themselves precisely enough to land directly on a target on the deck of a boat, while the older Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft have generally missed their targets by a few miles.4 Spacecraft undergoing uncontrolled reentry—like your package—can miss their intended landing site by hundreds or thousands of miles.

You can improve the precision of your package delivery by throwing the package really hard. A fast throw can get the package down into the atmosphere more directly, without a long delay as atmospheric drag causes its orbit to slowly decay in a hard-to-predict way. Surprisingly, the way to do this isn’t to throw the package downward, toward Earth. Instead, you should throw it backward. If you throw it downward, it will still have enough forward speed to stay in orbit—it will just be a slightly different orbit. You want it to lose speed instead.

The faster you throw the package, the more precise its landing. The ISS is traveling at almost 8 kilometers per second, but luckily, you don’t need to throw your package that fast. Shaving off just 100 meters per second from the orbital speed at the ISS’s altitude is enough to deliver your package to the atmosphere. Unfortunately, throwing something at 100 m/s is difficult. Even the fastest pitchers don’t break 50 m/s. Golf balls, on the other hand, travel fast enough. A golfer floating next to the ISS could conceivably hit a golf ball out of orbit in a single stroke. If your package is the size of a golf ball, you can try that delivery method.