The Soyuz has been the most efficient way to shoot people into space since 1968. It was developed in parallel with Apollo, and instead of throwing it away after the end of the moon program, they just kept it, and kept improving it – had NASA kept Apollo and improved it instead of throwing it away, and then throwing its successor away, then cancelling two successors in a row, to spawn a grand total of four parallel programs to maybe find one successor, who knows where the US space program would be now.

NASA's problems are less technical issues, and more a management one.