They seem to take off so slowly and I never see any kind of auxiliary propulsion near the nose to help keep things straight.
In: Engineering
First, they’re designed and built so that they’re aerodynamically stable and will tend to remain pointed in the same direction as they move through the air. Second, they’re steered, just not from the nose. There are a couple of ways to do this. Many rockets have what are called gimbaled engines. This means the engines can move around and point in different directions to steer the spacecraft. On the space shuttle, the SRBs and the orbiter’s 3 main engines could gimbal. Another option is to have the main engines be fixed but to have smaller engines called vernier engines located around the side or the base of the rocket be movable to steer it. The Soyuz has these. Once outside the atmosphere, this becomes irrelevant because there are no aerodynamic forces acting on the vehicle, and it just uses small thrusters to change its orientation.
They’re not steered from the nose. The engine nozzles can move around enough to create differential thrust to cause the rocket to tilt. The flight computers have gyroscopes on them to know which direction the rocket is pointing.
They generally are able to steer by pivoting the main engines themselves, a technique called [gimballing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbaled_thrust), or having smaller [vernier thrusters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernier_thruster), which works pretty well until you need to do fine manuevers without going forward (like spinning on your axis), which is where the [auxillary propulsion system you mentioned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_control_system) comes in.
Careful application of force from the rockets to balance out the weight distribution until it it travelling fast enough. It’s also important that they want the rocket to fall back at first, so the booster rockets can fall away from the shuttle, as well as gain momentum across the planetary surface instead of away from it.
They kinda do kinda don’t. There is a bit of turning they can do during launch, but not much. When calculating a launch they just sorta let themselves fall over as they go up to get in orbit. So long as it’s close enough to balanced during the launch it can keep itself going okay, but if it falls too far off track it won’t recover.
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