[mikegi]

That's right... the engineers who did the analysis had NEVER done this kind of analysis before - and came up with the clearly wrong result that it was safe to re-enter.... a move that may have cost 7 brave souls their lives

How did Boeing's move "cost 7 brave souls"? Let's assume that Boeing had the experienced engineers run the simulation and conclude that the Columbia was damaged, how would that have changed what happened? It's not like the Columbia could have remained in orbit and, from what I've read, there was no way to rescue them. At best, NASA would have been able to tell the crew that they were toast and give them time to say goodbye to their families from orbit.

[So Cal Rocket]

If the analysis showed a high probability of an unsafe re-entry, the Shuttle could have gone into a resource conservation mode... My guess is that had enough resources, if only life support and orbital stability was their goal, to last 4-5 weeks in orbit. It is possible that Discovery could have launched with a crew of 2 on a rescue mission in that time frame. Granted, some shortcuts would have had to have been taken, and the probability of total mission success somewhere in the 60-80% range, but I bet with all the resources that NASA has, that some type of rescue mission could have been deployed.