Took them a while and a few failed attempts to do so… but that “a while” was a historically short period. Five years and change from the founding of the company to the first orbital flight is about two years quicker than any other private rocket company.

Astra becomes the fastest rocket company to reach orbit

They were able to achieve this by disdaining NASA-style analysis paralysis and just designing a good-enough launch vehicle, followed by iterative testing, failure, fixing, testing again. This worked well for SpaceX; it worked well for Astra. Compare with SLS…