The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe has a lot of interesting stuff on this wrt the first astronauts (who were sourced from test pilots). The test pilots saw the astronauts as second class citizens, at first, because they weren't actually doing any steering. Once the astronauts became famous, they started demanding more manual takeovers, which the engineers didn't want to build because it could only really hurt, but the engineers were forced to build them!