I'm currently reading Mike Mullane's latest book.

It's also interesting to see what astronauts found about missions and their peers.
He's from the Air Force but was a backseat flyer and no real jetfighter pilot.

Astronauts were very happy when they got a flight assignment , but OTOH had some kind of classification about the type of astronaut and the type of mission.
For instance: test pilots thought they deserved more the astronaut title than jet pilots and they all thought they deserved it more than the scientists and all of them thought they deserved it more than the part-time astronauts....
So who gets the right to be an astronaut?

Then Spacelab flights were ranked very low, then came the satellite delivery flights , the robot arm handling flights, the rendez-vous flights, the docking to station flights and the spacewalking flights....
They wanted to be first to fly but if we see how it has evolved, the current shuttle flights are the most interesting ones ever!! Cameras all over (even during liftoff), rendez-vous and docking with the station and flip manoeuvre (very rewarding to the CDR and the PLT), onloading large structures (trusses for the construction) (rewarding to the MS3) and spectacular views during spacewalks (rewarding to the MS1 and 2)...

I hope the transition to another manned spacecraft won't reduce by too much the number of human spaceflight experiences...but I don't know...