Doesn't matter who is sponsoring it, Felix Baumgartner has balls of titanium.

The Columbia disaster might have been survivable if the crew elected to eject/had time to do so. Big question mark there. In most situations the speed is too fast, that is accurate. Even hypothetical hypersonic vehicles are too fast.

Where this technology might come in handy are for sub-orbital/low speed re-entries. An example would be Scaled Composites Spaceship One and SpaceshipTwo, and the white knight launch vehicle that routinely exceeds 50,000 feet. Now, the changes of an average paying passenger on a spaceshiptwo flight being capable of performing a Felix style jump is probably pretty low, but maybe the pilots will make it out alive...