This is very wrong. As pioneer astronauts Armstrong and Cernan had an important say in the Gemini and Apollo program especially in regard to safety procedures and 'human' friendliness (both are trained engineers by the way). At my work place we do some intense parallel computing on clusters and are occasionally consulted by the likes of intel when they're designing new hardware (and I'm sure this happens more frequently with other groups) because of our experience running their hardware to the max. Very few people have the knowledge and experience (both technical and practical) of what it's like on the user end to safely and reliably put a man in space and you shouldn't dismiss their views as coming from 'glorified pilots'