And fighter pilots were hero’s for my generation as well as astronauts, along with all of the soldiers who served in WW2. And yes they killed Nazis, that’s a good thing.
You do realize that you asked the members of THIS board why they admire astronauts and you got your answer, not society as a whole. Why do you think it would not be biased? So yours is a minority opinion on THIS board, but you are welcome to disagree. That’s not a 14 year old’s response, its a grown ups response.
The same person can do some things that are more or less admirable. Exploration is more admirable than killing people, even if the killing really was necessary. In an ideal world, killing Nazis wouldn’t have been necessary, because there wouldn’t have been Nazis to begin with. But going to the Moon would still have been necessary.
And that’s without even getting into the necessity of putting Nazis in charge of getting us to the Moon. 
You are wrong. It was a huge deal. And the astronauts themselves were the pioneers that ushered in space travel. It’s like saying today that Magellan, Marco Polo, and Vespucci were no big deal considering how we travel today.
But as has been pointed out, the astronauts actually WERE soldiers, and presumably would have followed orders to napalm Vietnamese villages just as readily as they followed orders to go to the moon. So I’m not sure that you can claim some higher moral ground for them just because they happened to draw the popular assignment.
Why are you treating this as a debate? If you want to argue your point please request a forum change.
Alternately, you are free to not participate in the thread if you don’t care for the discussion.
THE bomb.
The hydrogen bomb, Dimitri.
Except in matters of marriage fidelity.
Call me old fashioned, but it bothered me a lot when I found out how much of horn dogs they (practically*) all were. They had more groupies than rock stars and more sex on the road than basketballers. Riding rockets makes guys think their dick is as worthy of attention as the rocket itself. Must be the phallic nature of the business, I guess. Like NBA players, the astronauts had behind the scenes people that arranged their trysts in hotels and kept their wives in the dark. Anything for our boys!
*I assume John Glenn didn’t cheat, and if Lovell did, don’t tell me! It was bad enough finding out about my #2 fav, John Young,
As long as it’s consensual who cares?
Coincidentally, the whole “wife-swapping/key party” thing of the sexual revolution originated, by some researched accounts, among the military pilot communities in the Cold War sunbelt Florida and Southern California (where it remains a thing in conservative, civilian Tampa and Orange County).
The ugly non-consensual actions never were part of NASA, but did go on among military pilots, notoriously when the Tailhook scandal blew up.
There is certainly an instinct to want heroes, but my own view is that it is an instinct that should be fought diligently. We should not hold up any one person over others. To be civilized, there are a lot of instincts that one must constantly suppress. This is one of them.
Better than having Nazis on the moon. I’ve seen the movies.
Can do attitude, brass balls, brains. Basically we’re talking about PHDs who can win a bar fight. What’s not to admire? Big fan here. I’ve got a fairly extensive collection of astronaut bios. 20 of which are signed!
Astronauts are sports heroes for nerds. That’s nothing wrong with that at all, but let’s not puff this up more than it is. It’s not like admiring Buzz Aldren is objectively better admiring Jackie Robinson.
There’s always one on every crowd.
I’m sure the astronauts’ wives didn’t consent. Which was my point.
I don’t care if single guys are out banging groupies. But they weren’t single*, and, at the time, astronauts cheating on wives was NOT the image NASA wanted, but it was the reality they got.The astronaut image itself was “stable, married guy with 2.5 kids”, not playboy. So they cover up the hanky-panky in a thin veneer of wholesomeness and fictional Life magazine articles. If an astronaut actually got divorced, his chances of flying went down faster than a Soviet booster.
And, of course, the military was actually afraid of single officers, because they could secretly be carrying “teh gay”. So they had the contradiction of wanted stable homelives while undercutting it in practice.
*yes I know. He was the only one.
What about Healey and Nelson?
So are you angry at NASA and the press for hiding the infidelities, or at the astronauts for not being the paragons of virtue we were told they were? Any time you have widely admired people with “more groupies than a rock star,” you’re going to have infidelity. That fact alone doesn’t lessen their accomplishments or negate their other admirable qualities.
It’s worth remembering that until relatively recently, social expectations were such that the public wouldn’t have tolerated anything but perfection. Babe Ruth’s drinking and carousing were never mentioned in news articles. Every sports star, movie star, war hero was painted in the same glowing primary colors as clean-living paragons of virtue because that’s what the public demanded. As a kid, I saw Dr. King as a saintly hero. As an adult, I realize he had faults, infidelity among them. I still see him as a hero; I just don’t idealize him.
But what do you think should have happened re: the astronauts? Should NASA have kicked out anyone who’d cheated on his wife, no matter how sterling his qualifications, thereby decimating their ranks? Or should it have risked outrage and loss of funding by NOT covering up the sexual escapades? Or do you think astronauts should have been held to unrealistically high standards in every area, as they were portrayed by NASA and the press?
Right. Not all axes, just multiple axes. It’s always been dangerous to admire your role models beyond their areas of expertise. Normally you shouldn’t expect people to be good at more than one thing, whether science or sports or writing. Astronauts manage to be top-class in a few areas at once, which is remarkable. But they are still human in areas unrelated to space flight.
I am too young to remember the space race and its imbued patriotism. The technical achievements involved in space exploration are very significant and have spawned many other innovations. The idea of exploration has often been seen as dangerous and romantic. This was especially true when no one knew if the efforts were going to work at all. And people have looked up and studied the night sky and the planets for as long as there have been people. There are not a lot of astronauts, so the people chosen have often been quite accomplished.
I could not say it modern astronauts are as admirable as the original ones. But The Right Stuff was a highly entertaining book before it was a highly entertaining movie.
On the flip side, why would one think astronauts are unworthy of honour? The disasters and difficulties have shown there are real risks. And the idea of driving on the moon might be the most masculine idea of all time.