alt Hacker NewsAstronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to complete the mission and make it back safely, but every single person who signs up for a space mission wants to take that risk, and we don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that space can be safe, that accidents are avoidable, or that the astronauts themselves don’t know what they’re signing up for. A mission that fails should not be considered a failure unless it fails because we didn’t try hard enough.
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Highly recommend The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe about the Gemini astronauts. They mostly were test pilots prior.
My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.