It was done by NASA, who have a culture of triple/ quadriple checking and being very careful about mitigating risk in ways that may seem inefficient to some. I don't see NASA leading the effort to Mars in any meaningful way besides being a conduit for money from the treasury.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket ever launched, by a rather wide margin. It's had 439 successful launches and 2 failures. NASA's Space Shuttle had 133 launches and 2 failures.
People who don't normally follow space may be confused by recent things re: Starship because the media is being intentionally deceptive, as usual. These are not normal flights. They are purely experimental flights, mostly expected to fail, to gradually work the kinks out of the system. It's the difference between hitting compile and launching something to production.
There's no reason to think the Starship won't be at least as reliable. The point is that this culture of double and triple checking everything certainly adds a bunch of bureaucracy, but doesn't necessarily translate to positive outcomes.
