[Physicist]

NASA was faced with taking extreme measures (rush a rescue or park them at the space station are two possibilities) or guess it was okay to land.

I don't believe there was any way to launch a rescue mission or to dock with the ISS. If the Shuttle was fated to burn up on reentry (assuming that there was something wrong with the Shuttle, as opposed to a random event), then the crew was doomed, period.

[DK Zimmerman]

While I don't know what was possible or impossible, you generally don't find "impossible" solutions until you have to, then stand back and watch the miracles happen.

Due to the failure to ensure they could even look at what possible damage had been done, they didn't know if the impossible had to be found. They took the "easy" way out.

[FITZ]

I don't believe there was any way to launch a rescue mission

Yes and money spent towards rescue missions or improving them would be better spent on robot technology with robots that never needed rescuing.

[bvw]

That is an immature conclusion, I suspect. The real question should be were rescue contigencies truly investigated with full vigor? This seems to have been a procedural sholuder-shrug of a decision -- that no rescue was possible, so why make great efforts to check the damage.

There is a Soyuz somwhat near ready to go, and military rockets that given necessity's extremeties could have been adapted as resupply missions, to keep the shuttle up until a resue launch.

The Hubble telescope could have trained on the Shuttle belly to look for broke tiles, etc. etc.

NASA looks to have lost the vitality and vigor that are up to novel extreme situations.