It must have escaped your notice that Apollo 13 was a failure, caused by someone dropping the oxygen tank such that it could not then be drained later during tests. Their solution? Turn the heat on and boil off the liquid oxygen. Only problem was that this burned the electrical insulation, creating a time-bomb in the Service Module. The crew got back alive, but barely.
The "Right Stuff"? No, just human error -- sometimes found and corrected, sometimes not. In the 1950's -- the era of "The Right Stuff" -- test pilots died at a rate of about one a week. We've had 14 fatalities on the Shuttle since it started flying almost 28 years ago.
Apollo 13 was a success. The crew lived, the system showed itself to be robust. The Shuttle has ever been a fragile piece of crap, and deadly.