> not perfectly efficient

That's a bit of an understatement! It's estimated to cost $4.1 billion per launch--about double the already impressive $2 billion per launch that was originally budgeted. https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-22-003.pdf

If anyone has done the job of getting Americans interested in space, it has to be SpaceX. They have a huge following of young nerds who are getting into aerospace engineering because they do such a good job publicizing their development efforts.

SLS is so embarrassingly outdated when compared to SpaceX, it has done the opposite for me, it just made me realize how antiquated and bloated government projects are. Maybe it's more a reflection on how poorly the contracts were managed, idk. But comparing SpaceX vs SLS launches, SLS is a marvelous failure by every metric.