hmm a launch rescue plan with no room for error from NSA..speed up even..What we want two disasters with one month?
Someone's not dealing with reality wish full thinking
Someone's not dealing with reality wish full thinking
While in a military command and control situation it 'makes sense' to say these people are already lost, we just abandon them and move on, that would not be acceptable to the general public as that's not how things are perceived.
Indeed, it would almost certainly destroy the ability of NASA to continue if they were seen to be so impotent and incapable of doing anything when things go wrong.
A dramatic, high risk rescue attempt would possibly be the only option, even if that itself ended in disaster and death of all involved (a real risk according to the theoretical plan).
I think the public would have been more at ease knowing that a real rescue attempt was made and that genuine heroes had made the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to save their colleages. People are all mushy and emotional like that.
Would it have made sense in terms of risk assessment, as a direct risk-reward evaluation ? Clearly not. But it's not always about that.
Besides, this is an alternative time-line scenario which never was. Those always have the benefit of working just like in feel-good Hollywood movies.
I'll wager that Astronaut crews would have fought each other for the job, same for ground control staff. NASA managers? Obviously not.
If you study the problem and start prepping and when the time comes you decide it's too risky, that's one thing.
But to just blow off the idea without even looking into it is not smart.
They had a long history of debris strikes in previous launches. They did not know that there was catastrophic damage to the wing's heat shield. They noticed the strike after the shuttle was in orbit. They elected not to disrupt the schedule of the crew or request additional observation resources (i.e. ground telescopes) to inspect it, and instead, they did some mathematics modeling of the strike which ended up being inconclusive, so they chose not to spend more time and money investigate further.
That is not the same as thinking they knew there was a problem and the astronauts were doomed but they decided not to even bother trying to rescue them.
Also, I reach the opposite conclusion you do from "a long history of debris strikes". To me, this says that they absolutely knew there was a problem, and had known it for a very long time, but merely got used to it and dismissed it due to the ridiculous idea that it's OK to ignore if it hasn't killed anybody in the past. That history makes them look worse, not better. Same thing happened with Challenger and the O-ring leaks. The leaks were a serious problem and smart people said as much, but the concerns were dismissed on the basis that previous flights hadn't exploded so the leaks must not be serious.