Before I get into this, I have to say I DON'T KNOW the answers to any of this.

Would the crew have wanted to know?

Would the ground crew have wanted to know?

If I were on the ground, and knew there was a fatal problem on the Shuttle, and there were nothing to do, would I have told 'em?

Would I have told the families, and not the on-board people?

If I were on the ground, and there were a fatal problem with the Shuttle, would I have told them about that before a possible rescue were thought out and initiated?

(Apollo 13, to my limited knowledge the closest to this situation, was fundamentally different - the crew was WELL aware there was a problem. So they had to wait for the solution.)

Or would it be wisest to do what they did, nothing, and hope for the best?

Were there financial considerations in that decision? After all, your basic life when it comes to, say, airline safety, is worth about $1 million. If there were little likelihood anything would work, would pre-empting Russian and/or European scientific launches been prohibitively expensive? Or even possible?

Or PR considerations? What would have been the public response had there been no rescue attempt, or a rescue attempt which failed, and we were left to observe the long, lingering death of the crew? Would the public have demanded no more flights?

Or would we have supported a different orbiter, with crew protection on the order of what the Chinese are saying they are doing?

Dunno.

Arf