Airship To Orbit is JP Aerospace, not Bigelow. It seems like an utterly bonkers and fairly implausible concept and I'm definitely not equipped to analyze its merits. But the JP team have some legitimate accomplishments in the rockoon world, and appear to be honest, hardworking people. Definitely not grifters. I've been following their work on ATO since they first announced it at a Space Access conference in ... 2003, I think? Still can't figure out whether it's real or not.
Yeah, airship to orbit might still be a question mark, but there is a significant overlap in other useful areas.
You should be for example totally able to build an inflatable frame for a launch loop, making it possible to launch payloads from above most of the atmosphere.
Also for re-entry the more you lower the density of something, the less re-entry stresses there will be. So you could construct a giant low-pressure inflatable decelerator device and have it essentially float down all the way from orbit, incrementally shedding energy as it comes down over a longer period of time, taking care to balance the rate of descent, heating and internal/external pressures.
