Well, that's sort of how progress is made. "We've never tried this before."
I'd go. I won't pay for it, but I'd fly it. It's a somewhat crazy idea and it's a risky approach, but I'll go.
That said, the level of seriousness that the Apollo program put into flight termination options was staggering—probably because of how adversely the program was seen during the time it was running and as a result of the Apollo I fire. I just read a paper about abort option planning, and how each phase of the flight was meticulously planned to have some sort of alternative course of action to prevent the loss of the crew. Of course, some phases just don't have any redundancy (initial boost,
ascent from the Lunar surface and trans-earth injection), but almost everything else had very strong, redundant contingency planning.
(I still think an Abort Mode 1-Alpha during the first thirty seconds of powered flight would have killed the crew as booster engine cutoff was inhibited due to not wanting to rain angry bits of RP-1 and hot metal on the launchpad, but at least there was an option; basically anything wrong with the Shuttle while the SRBs were operating related to control or propulsion was a loss-of-crew-and-vehicle scenario even post-Challenger.)
That too.
The
politics of the Shuttle program were terrible, though. Let's have the incredibly intelligent, wonderfully well-read and amazingly attractive Vintage Space gal summarize it—