In fact, it's less wasteful in terms of absolute mass to trash the rocket.
Carrying fuel, parachutes, etc. to booster separation that you don't use to boost the rocket, or worse, carrying fuel, heat shields, aerodynamic surfaces, etc. to LEO for re-entry in addition to your payload, are wasteful. Non-critical mass to lunar orbit is even more extravagant.
When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together, or your tanks made by composite experts hand-laying carbon fiber in cleanrooms, yeah, it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn (or, I suppose, the other way around - first the burn, then the crash).
If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
> When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together... it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn
Note that the rocket engines used by SLS (RS-25, and to a lesser extent the solid rocket boosters) were explicitly designed for reuse, as part of the Space Shuttle program; all the way back in the 1970s.
The four RS-25 engines that Artemis 1 dumped in the ocean had previously flown on Space Shuttles. IIRC they first flew in 1999 (although Shuttles only used 3 engines).
> If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
Also note that the marginal cost of an SLS launch is 4.5 billion dollars. That doesn't include all the one-off costs, like R&D; certification; restarting production lines; etc. Famously, it cost over a billion dollars to restart the RS-25 production line (so they can replace those engines being dumped in the ocean); despite claiming that the use of existing tech would save money!
In fact, refurbishing & upgrading those existing Shuttle engines cost more than producing brand-new RS-25s. Again, it was claimed that reusing the existing Shuttle engines would save money...
Despite the cost of these assembly lines, SLS rockets aren't "flying off" them. The (few) scheduled Artemis launches are separated by years.
When what you're really selling is a jobs program for your constituents, perhaps consuming these rocket engines for each launch is not wasteful but good business!
Carrying fuel, parachutes, etc. to booster separation that you don't use to boost the rocket, or worse, carrying fuel, heat shields, aerodynamic surfaces, etc. to LEO for re-entry in addition to your payload, are wasteful. Non-critical mass to lunar orbit is even more extravagant.
When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together, or your tanks made by composite experts hand-laying carbon fiber in cleanrooms, yeah, it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn (or, I suppose, the other way around - first the burn, then the crash).
If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.