And during Apollo, the Astronauts kind of were a contemporary version of "rock star": they were chosen from a pool of daring test pilots, they drove fancy custom Corvettes, etc. As the initial problems with space flight were worked out, space flight increasingly become a specialization for science and engineering than something for highly qualified dare devils with "the right stuff".
I'm more intrigued by the disparity in China - they seem to be in a similar phase to Apollo, where there's massive national support for the program and it's attached to a sense of national pride. I wonder if it's also that culturally they've tended to more aggressively exhaust natural resources so colonization elsewhere feels like a more natural next step.
It's still very much something for highly qualified 'dare devils.' Around 4% of all astronauts have ended up dying 'on the job.' It's getting safer, but it's still one of the most risky jobs there is. For instance the Soyuz is the safest and most well tested launch system ever invented having flown some 1700 times - far surpassing any other rocket. Yet even there as recently as about 9 months ago there was a near catastrophe. This [1] is a video of the incident. Everything's going perfectly fine and nominal until one of the infinite number of things that can go wrong did go wrong, and the crew nearly lost their lives. Anecdotes such as this mean alot when we're only launching a handful of people to space per year.
This [2] is the American astronaut on the trip - Nick Hague. MIT masters in aerospace engineering, decorated colonel in the air force who acted as a test pilot for a wide array of different fighter craft, deployed for five months to Iraq where he enaged in experimental recon and flew combat missions, and so on. And that's a pretty typical resume.
I think a problem we have is that NASA administration have for years been just abysmal at getting the public interested in space. And this is a core requirement for their continued successful operation. Public interest drives funding. Without it, you get what NASA has turned into today -- huge chunks of their funding going to go-nowhere pork barrel projects and the youth of society preferring to post videos on the internet than go to space.
