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.
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.