STS 1 was a gamble and NASA won it. It did have to wait a long time to make it real, though!
I remember being very nervous in front of the TV set!!
But it returned back with a list of 52 malfunctions of some sort.

One of the current Shuttle problems is that both accidents occured so late after the first test flights. Especially Columbia: this is something much harder to correct!
Had a failure happened much earlier, (like with Soyuz and Apollo), decisions as to its fate would have been easier to take.
Now, with the Shuttle, we're faced with statistics and more resistance to change something that has actually worked many times, yet not enough , certainly, to make it as reliable as expected.

Raoul