Thanks to Josh Marshall for a pointer to this article from The Washington Monthly Online. It is dated from April, 1980 and discusses many of the problems with the development of the shuttle: technical, political, and economic. Of course, this was all before the first shuttle was even launched. The fragility of the tiles and the lack of choices if they fail is one of the problems the article mentions. Very worthwhile reading.

I noticed that the proposed schedule for shuttle usage was that they would be used for about 100 flights each over a 10 year period. In actuality they have only been used for about 100 flights for all shuttles combined, but over a 20 year period. While the scaling back of the frequency of the flights means that they have not been used as heavily as originally planned, the fact that they have been used for twice as long as originally planned indicates to me that my previous post about the shuttles being relatively ancient technology is not out of line with their own planning from the beginning.