I do want to be careful not to take Stratt's betrayal speech too literally, because it's obvious she says some contradictory things both when she first asks Grace to be part of the mission and when she tells him he doesn't have a choice. But I'm not judging any of this based on the things she says, I'm judging it based on the things she does.
Here's the conversation she and Grace have about the gene testing:
Stratt rolled up her sleeve. “Test my blood for the genes. I’m curious.” (...) When the blood draw was complete, she rolled down her sleeve. “Grace. You’re up next.”
“Why?” I asked. “I’m not volunteering.”
“To set an example,” she said. “I want everyone on this project, even tangentially related, to get tested. Astronauts are a rare breed, and only one in seven thousand of them will be coma-resistant. We might not have enough qualified candidates. We need to be ready to expand the pool.”
“It’s a suicide mission,” I said. “It’s not like we’ll have a line of people saying, ‘Oh, me! Please! Please me! Pick me!’ ”
“Actually, we do have that,” Stratt said.
She straight up lies to his face and says she's only asking him to get tested to set an example, not because there's any circumstance under which she expects him to go on the mission. Was it naive of Grace to not consider that he might be included in "expanding the pool"? Well, yeah, but he was operating under the assumption that they would be sending volunteers. He suggests finding volunteers might be hard, and Stratt assures him they already have many. At no point does she suggest they might have to coerce people into participating, she does exactly the opposite. And he's just made it very clear he has no intention of volunteering. It seems impossible to me that Stratt could have this conversation with him, not tell him about his gene test results, and then think "cool so he obviously knows he's my emergency backup plan".
I'd be curious to know where in the book you think she's alluding to him being the backup and he's not catching on, though. Perhaps I've missed something in that regard, because nothing comes to my mind.
In terms of what I'm saying about a third option, I think maybe I wasn't totally clear. I'm not saying that Stratt SHOULD have chosen Cáceres, I'm saying that she COULD have chosen Cáceres. It's not about whether it would have solved the problem, it's about the options and resources she had available when she made the decision. I'm trying to emphasise that Stratt didn't make the decision to send Grace whether he liked it or not when she was three days out from launch and the mission was on the brink of falling apart. She made that decision years ago, when she decided not to train Cáceres as a tertiary backup.
Btw I also have a sort of similar skill set to Cáceres so I imagine myself in her shoes too, lol, and I imagine I would be VERY out of my depth. It would be impossible with just three days, and if Yào and Ilyukhina died there's no way I could do everything Grace does to salvage the mission. But if I had years to train and if everything else went right then... maybe? That maybe is a LOT to gamble the fate of the world on, of course. But Stratt didn't have to either rule Cáceres out immediately or commit to her. It's not like she had any budgetary constraints. She could have trained her and decided later whether or not she'd learned enough to take over in the case of a disaster. And IN MY HEART this is actually what happened. Listen, it's completely insane to me that Stratt of all people only had one official alternate for each role. If I were planning this, I would have at least four candidates for each role - and I would have them training at at least two separate facilities. DuBois and Shapiro train at the main facility, Cáceres and Alternate Number Four train at a totally different place, ideally on another continent. Stratt has a rule against crew members travelling in the same vehicle as their alternate but really she should have had a rule against them ever being in the same city. And because Stratt strikes me as someone who has contingencies ten layers deep, my personal headcanon is that actually, Cáceres was trained, along with alternates for all the other roles, but this was kept highly confidential as a safeguard against malicious interference for example by terrorists. When the explosion happened, Stratt looked at Cáceres' progress, decided she was just not prepared for the mission, and moved on to contingency plan 3a: Ryland Grace. She never told the rest of the team that anyone else had been trained because she had already ruled those people out as viable options and she was leaning hard into the narrative that Grace was their only choice. (Obviously this part is just me making shit up to patch over plot holes and not serious analysis lol).
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