At orbital speeds around the Earth, things tend to burn up on striking the atmosphere, since they're going so fast. To get an astronaut (for example) home safely from those speeds, they need to have some kind of heat shield to protect them.
What if they were landing on Titan instead of Earth? At orbital speeds around Titan, how much heat shielding would you need to enter Titan's atmosphere without burning up?
From this answer, we learn that sounding rockets typically don't have a heat shield, despite entering very quickly and at high angles (Although not orbital speeds). Huygens, which orbited Saturn, entered Titan's atmosphere at about 6 km/s. The increased atmosphere will allow for a more gradual entry into Titan's atmosphere. Bottom line, it should be possible to make a spacecraft that can enter Titan's atmosphere without a heat shield, if one does so carefully.
As for a human rated one, it would be a bit more difficult, but not terribly so. Heat is related to the speed at which the spacecraft slows down. One can slow down very carefully on Titan, and could probably glide for considerable range, which would allow one to build a spacecraft that could enter fairly easily without an ablative heat shield.
from wikipedia:
Observations from the Voyager space probes have shown that the Titanean atmosphere is denser than Earth's, with a surface pressure about 1.45 times that of Earth's. Titan's atmosphere is about 1.19 times as massive as Earth's overall,[6] or about 7.3 times more massive on a per surface area basis.
Just based on those two facts, I would assume that heat shielding would absolutely be needed, comparable or more massive than those for Earth reentry. Of course, the size of the TPS would depend on the relative speed between the craft and Titan.
If the object were in strict orbit around Titan (I assume 1000 km altitude for a stable orbit), the orbital speed would be around 1.6 km/s, which would not require that much heat shielding ("only" comparable to a hypersonic aircraft, not e.g. a Shuttle)
