According to Wikipedia, "The crucial factor in the size and shape of the Shuttle orbiter was the requirement that it be able to accommodate the largest planned commercial and military satellites, and have over 1,000 mile cross-range recovery range to meet the requirement for classified USAF missions for a once-around abort from a launch to a polar orbit. The militarily [sic] specified 1,085 nm cross range requirement was one of the primary reasons for the Shuttle's large wings, compared to modern commercial designs with very minimal control surfaces and glide capability." The Orbiter's wings were a lot of dead mass to carry into orbit. Without this large cross-range requirement, the Orbiter might have been more of a lifting body design such as the X-38 or the Dream Chaser.
Some sources explain the copycat design of the Soviet shuttle Buran as the simply the result of Soviet engineers facing the same technical issues based on the same physics, and converging on similar solutions. I find this argument suspect since, even if Buran's design requirements included sun-synchronous missions, and I have seen no literature regarding that, Buran could have recovered at any of dozens of military airfields along a line from Murmansk to the North Caucasus Military District, which, being 1,000 nautical miles west of Baikonur, are located on the sun-synchronous track one revolution after a launch from Baikonur. So, I conclude that Buran was a knock-off of an American design for which the Soviets had little or no need.
On 9 February 2012 the National Reconnaissance Office released a redacted version of a 12 March 1997 interview of Hans Mark, former Secretary of the Air Force and former Deputy Administrator of NASA. On p. 16 he states, "The shuttle was in fact sized to launch HEXAGON. The size of the payload bay was determined by HEXAGON."
These military requirements would have been frozen into the design around 1972, yet Mark also states that as Secretary of the Air Force in 1980, he dragged the intelligence community kicking and screaming into putting their satellites on the shuttle. He implies that Jimmy Carter reallocated one billion dollars from the black budget to solve the shuttle program's fiscal problem in the FY 1981 federal budget.
The picture that is painted is that NASA, wanting the military as a Shuttle customer to shore up its mission model that showed the need for a high launch rate (which was the only way that the Shuttle could be shown on paper to make economic sense), made very costly design decisions to attract the political support of the military and particularly of the intelligence community, and still they didn't want to have anything to do with the Shuttle, to the point that Hans Mark had to tell them, "You asked for it, you got it, now get on it."
This points up the level of disarray among space policy makers in the 1970s. The Pentagon and the intelligence community told NASA, "Sure, go ahead and build this thing if you want to." They told NASA what it wanted to hear, because it justified building an Aerospace White Elephant. With the Apollo program winding down, NASA had to have an Aerospace White Elephant to keep from shrinking back down to the tiny agency it had been during Project Mercury.
It is also an example of how technocracy, drunk on its successes of the 1960s, went on an absolute bender in the 1970s. It was the age of Aerospace White Elephants. Britain and France built the Concorde, the Soviet Union built the Tu-144, and instead of building its own SST the United States built the Space Shuttle. Anything could be made to fly if you paid enough engineers, whether or not it made sense.
The Soviet Union, the most emotionally insecure national security state of all time, had to build two Aerospace White Elephants, not just the Tu-144, which was an unmitigated disaster, but also the Buran, which, had that program continued, I have little doubt that it too would have proved an unmitigated disaster. The laugh is that the Soviets built the Buran because they feared the capabilities of the Shuttle and saw it as a potential space weapon, while in reality the US national security establishment had only a passing interest in the Shuttle at best.
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