Case 1, load her up with anti-rad meds and otherwise give her every chance to survive, but yeah, she gets the order. Saving 249 beats out saving 50 any day of the week.
Case 2, ehhh. This is trickier. Since there’s no civilians to think about, I might consider leaving the choice to the crewman in question.
The difference to me is in the fact that #1 is basically an act of God or nature. The order isn’t to “go off and die”, but instead to “go make the lifesaving repairs in a certain death environment”. It doesn’t feel the same as ordering a crewman to surrender himself for execution in #2. The lack of civilians to protect also makes the choice easier.
If it were me, I like to hope that I would surrender myself. I suppose I just have to hope that I’ve inspired the same in my crew. Otherwise, if he wants one of my crew, he has to go through all of us first. Let him think about that when he’s sleeping at night.
I’m surprised that only one person has questioned the idea that the crew can be evacuated but not the passengers. There might not be enough life pods available for the colonists, but they get whatever space there is. All crew are to assist with the evacuation and are under orders to shoot on sight any non-civilian attempting to board a life pod.
The reason that hasn’t been questioned (until now) is that the threads isn’t about finding a solution to the technical problem. It’s about resolving the ethical conundrum. I could easily have added more details to make it clear that evacuating the passengers is impossible – for instance, saying that majority of the life pods will not be able tp get far empugh away to escape the coming explosion–but I wastrying for a bare bones approach for the sake of brevity.
And, anyway, you’re fighting the hypo. You might as well say “In the nick of time, the Legion of Super-Heroes appears; Supergirl rips out the engine core and throws it into the nearest sun, and meanwhile Sun Boy & Wildfire absorbs all the radiation, Element Lad maintains a breathable atmosphere, and Mon-El tows the Treader to the nearest port.”
I was going to say that you’d never have to order Scotty to do sacrifice himself, but in fact we don’t know. We only twice saw him presented with a technical problem he couldn’t genius his way out of. the first time Spock took the hit of it; the second time he bugged out with everybody else.