[rob74]

Well, you could say that those plans were ultimately accomplished, although much later and in a different form: the shuttle was used to build a space station (the ISS - not in the 80s, but in the 2000s) and was eventually replaced by a new vehicle (again much later, in the 2020s, with an embarrassing gap in between, and the new vehicle looks much like the shuttle's predecessors - but still...)