I used to be a mechanical engineer for several space shuttle missions. You're missing a critical element. Human space flight is insanely dangerous with today's

I used to be a mechanical engineer for several space shuttle missions. You're missing a critical element. Human space flight is insanely dangerous with today's technology. Astronauts accept this and NASA's engineers accept this. The safety requirements for a shuttle launch are voluminous and arcane - to the point where they restrict the freedom of engineers to solve problems to a significant degree. Most people don't know that spaceflight technology has barely improved since the 60's. The primary reason is safety. That a shuttle (and it's crew) blows up is regrettable, but when you strap a cargo truck to a giant tank of hydrogen and light it on fire, someone is going to die from time to time. It's not like they don't know what they're getting into. Figuring out how to keep the crew alive after the shuttle's main tank explodes is just a bad idea. Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out a way to keep the rockets from coming apart in the first place? How many additional failure points would you introduce by creating a failsafe for that unlikely case (of which there are thousands if not millions). Of course we should learn from failures, but the surest way to kill the space program is force it to be safer. If anything, they need to inject more risk into space flight so that better technologies can gain the ever-elusive "flight heritage". Trust me, astronauts would still line up for a chance to fly even if you doubled the risk of death.