<I believe the old Apollo capsules had a foil like heat shield.

The Apollo capsule used a thick, ablative heat shield designed to vaporize layer by layer to carry heat away from the space capsule. They worked quite well, but were not reusable.

Could something like a blanket type heat shield be developed for the shuttle that would cover the nose and front part of the wings.

The heating on leading edges is beyond the capacity of current blanket insulations. It's even beyond normal tiles, which is why they use reinforced carbon-carbon at these points (the "gray" parts of the Shuttle on the nose and leading edges of the wings and tail)

On another subject couldn't part of the space station be evacuated in such an emergency to allow time for a shuttle rescue mission by using the stations life boats?



This would leave supplies for the rest of the remaining astronauts.



There is a Russian Soyuz capsule always docked to the Space Station for just such emergencies. One could also isolate different parts of the Station by closing hatches, although I don't know offhand where such hatches are located or how many there are. In a real bad emergency, the Soyuz capsule can be used to return three astronauts to Earth. The fact that there is only one such capsule is why the ISS can only safely have a maximum of three inhabitants. Work on a larger lifeboat, the Crew Return Vehicle (CRV) has been largely abandoned. This vehicle would have allowed the automated rescue of up to seven crewmembers, even if they were injured.

A prototype of the CRV, the X-38, has been drop tested a number of times for parachute landings.

CRV