In common principle, the re-entry is in the same atmosphere, and if the conditions were the same between launch and landing, you'd certainly expect there could be the same heating on the spacecraft in both cases. But, there are a few vital differences between landing and launch which means that the spacecraft winds up dealing with much more heat on its way back down to Earth surface than it does going up to space.
The Pulling Gravity From Earth Is More Likely Fast Since There's No Gravity In Space
The major difference is because when you launch a space rocket ship, you start out stationary relatively to the ground. The goal of a launch is to speed yourself up to the point where gravity's down force is no longer sufficient to pull you back to Earth. Any given orbit is simply a matter of dropping while moving around the object you would like to not crash into; you're still falling, but the sideways motion is enough to keep you at the same distance above the ground. A spacecraft's launch is the slow, rumbling from the start to building up this speed.
When you're in orbit, you're going much faster falling to the ground. The International Space Station, for instance, orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes or so, which means that it's going slightly over 17,000 miles per hour in space. Any spacecraft which visits the ISS, therefore, should start from 0 miles an hour, stationary on a launch pad, and reach 17,000 miles an hour. If you're starting in space and trying to land, you need to reverse this; you need to start from fastening around above the planet and slow yourself down to 0 miles an hour.
In the calculation, the difference in starting speed, the atmosphere is not evenly dense from top to bottom. The top edge is much less dense than the bottom is. And if you're heating up the spacecraft due to relations with the atmosphere, those interactions are going to be reliant on both the speed at which you encounter the atmosphere and the thickness of the atmosphere.
Distance Between Spacecraft And Earth's Gravity Weakens As It Goes Further Into Space
When you're launching the planet, your craft will be moving rather gradually while it's going through the densest parts of the atmosphere, which means that the heat produced will be small. It's only when the craft leaves the densest regions and gets into the very thin upper atmosphere that it starts to get up to the orbital speeds that can produce strong heating, but by that point, there's not enough atmosphere left to produce heat.
If you're coming back from space, you're hitting a progressively thick wall of the atmosphere at very high speeds, and the combination of dense air and high speeds is present, letting the super high temperatures to be shaped. The atmosphere is so heated by the re-entering craft that it forms a shock wave of plasma around the spacecraft for at least a few minutes as the craft slows down. This plasma interferes with radio between ground and spacecraft, so it's often an uneasy time, as the ground control is unable to link with the crew to check on how things are going.
To shield the spacecraft, and its crew if one exists, most crafts are tailored with a heat shield; this is a heat resilient material on the edge of the re-entering craft. The heat shield is intended to vaporize at high temperatures very slowly, allowing the hottest parts of the shield to flow away from the craft, and preventing the heat from building up near the spacecraft, which could result in the devastation of the entire craft. The partial loss of the honesty of the heat shield on the space shuttle Columbia led to the tragic loss of craft and crew in 2003; the heat shield is a critical module to a safe and effective re-entry.
