It'd certainly make it possible, but it doesn't mean it would happen. What's the benefit to...I dunno, McDonalds of having an orbiting McSat? Those that do would be those with some business reason for it--you could see microgravity research for pharma, perhaps, but it's going to be more about people whose businesses already could benefit from microgravity experiments being able to afford it than random companies starting to put up sats.
A lot of strange things could happen if it costs only a few tens of thousands of dollars to put a sizable payload into orbit, and a few hundred thousand dollars to put someone into LEO.
Also, there are the things that can be manufactured in microgravity. I'm not sure how much of it was just theorizing on what could be done as opposed to what is known to be possible, but in the 1980s there was talk of manufacturing extremely high quality electronics, metals, chemicals, medicines, and optics in microgravity. Perhaps precision measuring equipment and scientific instruments could be produced in space too.
Parachutes are much rougher--they have a limit on how much they can practically slow you--so you need landing rockets anyways (as the Soyuz has), at least if you want to do land landing (well, there are other options like airbags, but the Soviets had experience with rockets). Rockets also allow a certain degree of powered, controlled flight, and hence allow a more precise landing than parachutes, which is why SpaceX, for example, is planning on using rockets as the primary landing system for its capsules.
Additionally, as with SpaceX, you can reuse your landing rockets as abort rockets, so you get double duty out of them.
I suppose if they are trustworthy enough for an abort situation they would be trustworthy enough for landing. If the system is anywhere near as precise as an ICBM reentry vehicle, the capsules could land in more convenient locations for recovery, such as the space center, a refurbishment facility, airport, etc.
I have to step in here and point out that VentureStar was a pure 1990s program--started under Clinton--and was cancelled because it basically was not working. A continuing Cold War quite possibly butterflies it away from existing, and even if it doesn't the technical immaturity of the design probably dooms it.
That being said, the design would stick around; as I have noted elsewhere, Lockheed had been shipping it around since the 1960s. But it's entirely possible that it just remains a paper proposal rather than a real design.
Was VentureStar the Space Shuttle Mk. II, or was that something else? It seems unlikely that the Space Shuttle would have served for three decades without replacement in a Cold War world, and that a replacement would likely have been scheduled for service in the 2000s.