It does not necessarily need to go all the way down to the surface of the earth in order to be useful.
Lets say we have a platform, just above the atmosphere so we don't have to worry about air friction. The platform is connected to a satellite in a much higher orbit, and as a result it is traveling at a much lower speed than it would need to, in order to stay in orbit.
Being able to get a spacecraft to that platform without having to achieve full orbital velocity would save a lot of fuel.
“Being able to get a spacecraft to that platform without having to achieve full orbital velocity would save a lot of fuel.”
You’d save much more fuel just lifting a rocket to the upper atmosphere with a dirigible and then launching it from there, where you could avoid 90% of the atmospheric resistance, since that is where the really big fuel cost comes from. Even better, dirigible technology is old news, so we can almost certainly build something like that without developing much new technology, we just need to work out the engineering.