alt Hacker News> Well, it's not reusable
No it's not. And it's indeed very costly. But on the grand scale of things of what the US DoD spends per day as a fully loaded lifetime cost to operate a single SSN, SSBN or aircraft carrier, it's a drop in the bucket. They spend absurd amounts of funds on all sorts of things.
Perhaps the issue is not money, but production capacity? Those take some time to build, and you don't want to deplete your stockpile on spy balloons.