The astronauts do not intend to die on their missions. They feel they are taking a substantial risk in order to achieve a highly valuable goal. That is not insane or suicidal.
In the immortal words of Joycelyn Elders, "We're all going to die of something, sometime."
highly valuable?
Seriously, what value is shuttle.
Low Earth Orbit.
We are 15 years behind where we were 30 years ago.
The space station exist to give the shuttle something to do. The shuttle exist to build the space station.
The Space Shuttle serves no needed social benefit, it is murder for the sake of a jobs program, and is the horrible side-effect outcome of super effective public relations by NASA in those programs up to the lunar landings which were genuine scientific explorations. And they were safer!
There were 11 manned Apollo missions, they all brought their crews home alive. A failure rate of 0%. There would have and should have been more Apollo missions,
But socialism won out. The Space Shuttle was a far more effective jobs and contracts program. The Shuttle killed our lunar exploration program. Socialism can't stand competition.