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...
The differences between the speed of jumping out of a balloon and a sub-orbital plane are almost infinite. That planes have to move so fast to get any lift out of their wings at that altitude, I'm not sure you can slow something down enough to facilitate getting out of it until it reaches denser air. By that time, there probably won't be much left of it. You could make some sort of capsule or pod, but then you might as well just equip it with a chute and splash it down like the rocket pods.
