To be fair, Apollo also had government funding to the tune of approximately 2.5% of GDP. Starship would probably go a bit faster too with an annual budget of half a trillion.
When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.
NASA's slow but meticulous approach has had a few failures, but also incredible successes such as the sky crane martian rover landing - got to get it right first time, tough to move fast and break things when the test environment is 100 million miles away!
Edit: Same goes for 1969's lunar lander - had to work first time.