I've always loved this anecdote. It really illustrates the adventurous attitude and boldness these astronauts. If they were fully fueled, there was a non-zero chance they would have just landed. What's Houston gunna do about it?
Sometimes there are "interesting" incidents where you get to see this psychology in weaponized form, like the Terminator-esque jilted astronaut lover story from back in 2007. I'm not surprised at all to hear that contingency means might be taken to limit related risks on space missions.
I remember reading something years ago along the lines that the astronauts they would select for a hypothetical mars mission would be a totally different type than the Apollo astronauts.
The Apollo guys were more the cowboy and daredevil type, where for an 18 month space mission you’d need much more level head types.
Not sure if that was a thing NASA had already planned for, but it always made sense to me.
These days astronauts routinely spend months in space, and indeed their selection process and education requirements are rather different—as of course is the whole purpose and character of the manned spaceflight program.
It should be said, though, that Neil was selected as the CDR of the first mission to land exactly because he was not a gung-ho type but instead extremely calm, collected, and not one to make a number of himself. Buzz, on the other hand, was and is a much more hot-blooded personality.
Interesting interview with him from 2011:
This was the premise of MARS-500 mission/experiment.
JC: Any regrets you were never selected by NASA as an astronaut?
CY: In order to get into the space program, you had to have a degree. I only had a high school education. In the early Mercury program, everything was done from the Cape [Kennedy] anyway. The guys didn’t have a hell of a lot of control, and that to me isn’t flying. I wasn’t interested.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2017/01/23/chuck-yeage...
Edit: https://twitter.com/genchuckyeager/status/918320874947715074...
[1] http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_11.html http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_12.html http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_13.html
Preventing them from flying another mission, ever, presumably.
(Though the 10 astronauts all did at least one more, with two of the three eventually getting their turn on the moon)
To other readers: OP is talking about the astronauts of Apollo X, not a quantity of ten astronauts.
[1] https://www.space.com/39341-john-young-smuggled-corned-beef-...
JFK would have called: "Give them written warning and yell at them, Then you bring them to DC. I have to shake their hand and we have to plan for celebration and other stuff."