It's not useful to compare timelines. Of course the Apollo program went fast. Adjusted for inflation, NASA's lunar program cost over $300 billion. It also killed three astronauts. And it didn't have the regulatory hurdles that exist today when trying to launch rockets.

Starship's budget is 2-3% of the Apollo program, and its goal is to become profitable long term. I would assume that given a sliver of the same budget, and a much harder problem (fully reusable super heavy lift vehicle), and more regulations than the 1960s, it would take significantly longer.

It's also not useful to compare failure rates yet, because Starship is currently a test program. SpaceX believes that it's cheaper to build, test, and revise rather than to try getting it right the first time. They know Starship is not reliable, which is why they don't have real payloads in their test flights. Contrast this to the Space Shuttle, which NASA thought was so safe that they put a schoolteacher on it and broadcast the launch to children across the country.

This is the 4th launch where they are effectively attempting the same thing they were going to do 8 months ago.

Musk himself has a deadline of December 2026 for Mars, ignoring Artemis. How many more launches do they need to work out orbital refueling to make that deadline if they don’t test actually sending a real payload into space?