I meant to compare getting to GEO (as proposed in the paper) as opposed to Lunar orbit.

Of course the way I worded this is a bit lose, and it's not completely free, but according to the figure in that Wikipedia article, the difference between getting into geosynchronous orbit and getting to lunar orbit from earth seems to be only about 0.1km/s, which is negligible compared to the total cost. So my basic point still stands.

It's actually really expensive to get to GEO.