One of the things you could do to solve the problem is to put the Shuttle on top of the Saturn I-B. The thing is a monster and you'd have all the gunk down by the engines, instead of right next to the Shuttle where the tiles can get slammed around like china in a shop full of bulls.
We could build the Saturns, again, but you'd spend a year getting the production line going. Remember, we started from scratch and built them.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
It'd have to be an orbiter only without main engines. You don't want the current orbiter sitting on top of something. The main engine exhaust sluicing down the sides of a rocket would be ungood. The current design blows the exhaust out the bottom of the stack along with the SRB exhaust gases.
As I recall the S1B thrust was in the range if 1.5 million pounds. That would make for a much smaller orbiter with limited payload capacity. The S1B was sufficient to lift the Apollo command and service modules into low orbit, but when you added the lunar module you needed the Saturn V even for Earth orbit missions, like Apollo 9 did. My guess is the Saturn V would have to be resurrected if you want to fly anything like the current orbiter but without main engines. Then you're back into big, expendable boosters again and have gone back to the future, with the bean counters complaining about the cost of those one-shot big boys.