Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:

I consider (b) to be a huge factor. With the original shuttle design when
you need to do repairs quickly you must either have a huge stock of tiles
(most of them that you will never use) or have equipment ready to custom
cut/shape a material that is very hard to work with. In comparison for an
axisymmetric design only a relativily few shapes are needed. Maintaining a
repair stock pile becomes a lot cheaper.

Another thing in favor of the capsule: while you can't mould an entire
space shuttle in one tile, it should not be impossible to make a single
tile that can cover the entire bottom of the CEV.

Whether this is desirable or not I'll leave up to the experts to
decide. Tiles might be easier to deal with if the heat shield has to be
replaced or touched up often.

Jon Acheson