It's all a matter of mindset. Little old ladies routinely take airlines at near-sonic velocities and seven-mile altitudes and never give it a second thought. In their own lifetimes, these were once regimes traveled only by military professional pilots or research test pilots. When a plane crashes, the airline industry doesn't collapse. They fix the problem, and go on. Unless the crash is due to a structural or other problem inherent to the specific aircraft, the other airplanes aren't even grounded. Another plane is rolled off the line to replace the lost one.

And the technology required to build a 767 is not that much different than the technology required to build a spacecraft.

While I wouldn't go the Roton route again as a design, every manned launch system I have ever designed was "savable," i.e. recoverable at every stage of launch. All of them included at least one level of manned abort system, often a separate escape pod (show me a commercial airliner with any passenger rescue system at all).

The Shuttle is an exotic, bleeding-edge (operationally, not technologically) system. They CANNOT build another orbiter. The fleet is down to three. There is absolutely no incentive for NASA to build a simple, low-cost system. It's like asking an elephant to do gymnastics. Only high-cost, complex systems justify NASA's existence and funding. I think we can see where this is going to end up.

The private sector is going to have to run with this ball. Fortunately, there are some outfits looking to do exactly that.