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Throughout the two-week flight of Columbia in January, NASA engineers and managers had wrestled with whether the impact of insulating foam on the shuttle’s wing during launch posed any threat. But neither serious inspection plans nor workable rescue scenarios were ever developed because the need for them wasn’t recognized.

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The NASA team described their findings in an oral presentation on May 22 to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which verbally described the findings to the news media. But both NASA and CAIB declined to to provide the briefing documents on which those findings were based; documents that MSNBC.com has since obtained.

Parallel tracks: Rescue, repair

The study rests on two major assumptions:

That there was a recognized catastrophic threat to the shuttle and crew, either from a 6-inch hole in the leading edge of the wing, or a 10-inch gash from the loss of a panel-to-panel seal.

That NASA management was willing to risk another shuttle launch even before the cause of the fatal damage to the first was known.

From those assumptions, the NASA team developed a timeline of events:

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http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077563/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/documents-detail-shuttle-what-ifs/#.UQsis_Jrqdw