It's hard to do that. What you suggest would mean losing all your orbital speed before you hit the thicker layers of the atmosphere. You could probably do that, but you'd use a lot of fuel to decelerate. And then you are still being accelerated downwards by gravity, so you need something to counter that, which means you need to burn fuel all the way down. All that fuel adds a lot of weight, which cuts down on the amount of useful stuff you can take with you.