In the 1970s, NASA used to claim with a straight face that the Space
Shuttle would be launched every two weeks and eventually bring down
the cost of access to space to pennies per pound.

One of the real reasons the Shuttle even made it to reality was due
to its ability to lift large military satellites for placement into orbit.
Everything else was secondary but used as a cover or made into an
after-the-fact reason for the Shuttle's existence and mission.

We should have had something like the Shuttle back in the first days
of manned space exploration, rather than the tin cans we got due to
our concerns about beating the Soviets into the Final Frontier. We
were working on such projects with the X-15 and X-20, the latter
best known as the Dyna-Soar. That project was cancelled in 1963.

I never found the Space Shuttle inspiring. I always knew it would
never do what it had been promised and that it would never be
anything beyond a LEO moving truck. To go from the glory days of
Apollo to the Shuttle has meant a decades-long detour from our
true expansion into deeper space. Had we listened to the original
planners of the early Space Age, we would have had humans on
Mars by now and lunar colonies at the least.

This is how our space program should have proceeded, or at
least something close to it:

http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/disney_article.html