No seriously, I think there is a foundational difference between our perspectives here that is going to be really hard for you to overcome. For you, this situation would be awful. You’ve made that very clear. For me, and I am being 100% honest here, I would trade places with them in a heartbeat, and if I didn’t my family would never forgive me. My father might never speak to me again if he found out I’d turned down an opportunity like that, my partner might leave me. No, I really mean it.
There are different people in the world. The kind of people that become test pilots have families that have to have accepted the incredible danger inherent to the job. Astronauts are in the same situation. Imagine what it must be like to love an astronaut test pilot. That would be incredibly stressful, and I would be nothing short of thrilled that this was not a worse disaster.