As awesome as it was in concept, that thing was a safety nightmare from the very beginning. With every other manned spacecraft if something goes wrong during launch you can blast off and land the capsule safely in the ocean, but with the shuttle there were large portions of the ascent and descent profiles where, if something went wrong, you were going too fast to turn around but too slow to make it to space so you were just hosed.
As awesome as it was in concept, that thing was a safety nightmare from the very beginning. With every other manned spacecraft if something goes wrong during launch you can blast off and land the capsule safely in the ocean, but with the shuttle there were large portions of the ascent and descent profiles where, if something went wrong, you were going too fast to turn around but too slow to make it to space so you were just hosed.