For your reference, records indicate that
Jeff Findley wrote:

Balloon launch isn't worth the trades which have to be made, IMHO.

Certainly not today, no, or people would be doing it. But as I keep
saying, new technologies keep popping up all the time that might make
it viable in the future, at least for a few use cases.

By your definition, a passenger carrying aircraft is "waste" because it
flies from one destination to another while carrying passengers.

Yes; that is true by any definition. Just because it’s (arguably) the
least wasteful mode of transportation we currently have says nothing
about how we might travel in the future.

They don't give a rat's ass about the "waste" of the
actual aircraft having to fly there and back.

That same logic could have been used regarding ship or train travel
prior to the airplane’s dominance. The point being that they *will*
care as soon as a new technology comes along that allows more
efficient travel. What that might be in reality is unknown, but
clearly something like teleportation or Futurama-style tubes are
sci-fi ways of moving just the bits that need to be moved from one
location to another.

When your hardware costs more than two
orders of magnitude more than your propellant does, it makes a hell of a
lot of sense to "expend" a bit of propellant to get your expensive
hardware back intact.

Yes. And I’m just wondering why you can’t just take the next step and
admit that eliminating that expensive hardware *completely* would
represent a cost saving of two orders of magnitude! You wrote it, but
it’s like you weren’t really thinking about what your words actually
meant.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly