> Shuttle that was anomalous in having no provisions for crew survival if something happened
Shuttle had launch abort modes. There was a dead zone during SRB burn, but the rest of the assent had planned abort modes for saving the crew.
Shuttle had launch abort modes. There was a dead zone during SRB burn, but the rest of the assent had planned abort modes for saving the crew.
Those alone made it a serious death trap, if you're designing man-rated systems, you like the big boosters to be liquid fueled because you can turn them off if needed, and in many if not most of the relevant failure modes they'll effectively do that anyway.
And getting back to my point, as echoed by others, none of these equal a launch escape system, a "Get me the hell out of here!" system for when things have gone horribly and irretrievably wrong with the main system.
Particularly unforgivable when it was billed as a boring space truck, when in reality it needlessly ran on the hairy edge in many of its systems. Add the post-Apollo NASA's public works attitude, and we ended up with NASA killing two shuttles and their crews.
By the same token, I heard first hand from the guy who developed the reentry vehicle that the crazy scheme of Apollo which left us with no operational hardware off the earth was done because it spent "a billion" (8 billion in 2016 dollars) more in Texas, where LBJ just happened to hail from, and back then the race to the moon project was explicitly hailed as a way to spend money in the South and increase its tech know-how.
You use rockets optimized to get from earth to the LEO station, to transfer between the two stations, then one to get to and from the Moon. Cheaper, and you keep long lived and potentially permanent assets up there, anything you loft to LEO is done at tremendous expense, course.
Two flies in the ointment for assets beyond LEO and not under a lot of lunar soil/rock:
Apollo was primarily a political stunt to convince the rest of the world our technology as good or better than the USSR's, who'd we'd let get out into space first to get them to establish the open skies principle that orbiting over someone else's territory wasn't spying (something they were insisting up to a week or month before Sputnik). Such assets were superfluous for the stunt, plus there was a very strong RFK/LBJ prejudice against any hint of military utility in NASA's space program.
That plus internal politics which allocated the initial catch-up job to a group which was only good at making truly impressive launch pad explosions put us on the back foot in terms of getting out into space, and the Soviets made a fairly serious effort to beat us to the moon, e.g. look up the N1 rocket.
Second, and seldom remembered is that the whole program was predicated a quiet Sun cycle, that's the determining reason I've read why the last two missions were canceled, the program had sufficient delays that it was getting into the danger zone, and Nixon wasn't about to kill an Apollo crew.
For some SF coverage of this, read Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars where during an interplanetary voyage all the passengers and crew had to huddle for a while into the small shielded space the craft had for such an event.
The approach of sending a large, but modular spacecraft all the way to the moon also proved to have the ability survive some rather interesting failure modes [1] so maybe it was not so crazy after all?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_ascent [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13#Accident
And, yet, that became part of the plan rather quickly, it and EVA (extra-vehicular activity) were the big flashy parts of Project Gemini, during which I started following it all in real time.
The SRBs had a way to turn them off by opening two exhaust ports near the top that would let the gasses out and neutralize the thrust.
But it's still a bit iffy, which is why cryogenic liquid fuels are the most common choice for human-rated launchers.
Short of not using them at all, exhaust ports at the top as mentioned by exDM69 sound like least worst option.
As you say, "a bit iffy", at the very minimum.
Horizontal re-entry also allows the capsule to 'fly' by trading horizontal velocity for lift, keeping it in the upper atmosphere for longer. That isn't an option when falling strait down.
Not surprisingly not a single astronaut survived Columbia's depressurization at altitude, because of failure to engage active life support. (A blessing because they had a literal snowballs chance in hell of surviving what followed, but still...)
Shuttle's abort modes, including the bailouts, were premised on the craft being under control. Given the forces involves, if it wasn't under control it probably was about to disintegrate. But the same is true of spaceX-style capsule launches. Whether parachutes would correct a tumbling capsule, or rip it in half, is an open question. They both need to initiate abort procedures at least a millisecond before the craft departs into uncontrolled flight.
(And aborts can be triggered automatically, or by someone on the ground.)
A tumble should be fairly trivial to detect and fire only when the capsule's in its upwards pointing portion of the tumble. Plus, you'd only be firing into the ground if you're pretty early in the launch - the Dragon launch abort only sent it up a kilometer or so. Finally, the launch abort is pretty sensitive - deviating not far off the right direction should trigger it, before a full-on tumble.