The story I remember about Neil Armstrong, is that one of his colleagues was chatting to him about some mundane stuff in the office, and then later on found out that Neil had earlier ejected from the first Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (aka US Flying Bedstead, as distinct from the UK Flying Bedstead, which was used by Rolls Royce in the development of VTOL aircraft) prior to it crashing. Neil hadn't mentioned it, or appeared to have been shaken by that event at all.
He was definitely made of "the right stuff" to be so unflappable after coming near to meeting his maker a lot earlier than he ultimately did.
Three out of the five LLRVs/LLTVs (Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, a newer version of the LL Research Vehicle) crashed, with the pilots having to eject. All those pilots survived, but it wasn't exactly the safest vehicle in the world!
The Saturn V program was incredibly expensive, although modern technology ought to allow us to build things more cheaply now. Several of the larger launch vehicles have been initially designed as manned rated vehicles (Ariane 5 for example), so would be relatively easily produced in that type of variant.
The unmanned, robotic vehicles have been favoured by most of the worlds space agencies, since they can get more "bang for the buck" with those. The Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) cost a mere $2.5 billion, which is a fraction of each Apollo launch. Designing and building manned space vehicles is a lot more expensive than unmanned vehicles because of the natural tendency to be a lot more careful with something that's loss will very likely cause fatalities.
NASA has still managed to make some spectacular cockups with their manned programmed. If you look at the investigations into things like Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, they were all predictable and largely caused because people became complacent about things that should have been noticed, but had happened before, so "clearly weren't going to be a problem".
NASA is incredibly expensive, even compared to other space agencies. I can't comment on the Russian, Indian agencies (and many of the others), but I have some knowledge of ESA and NASA, and whilst projects involving ESA are expensive, they're relatively cheap compared to NASA! On the other hand, having seen how the Chinese construct spacecraft, I'd be somewhat averse to flying on a Chinese manned space vehicle!
Of course, compared to pretty much every space mission ever launched, most countries expenditure recently on things like warfare (or "peace keeping"), and bailing out economies massively dwarf them, with terms like billions of dollars/pounds/euros often being insufficiently large enough to easily express the numbers involved.
The UK is a leading country in the manufacture of spacecraft, and involvement in the space industry, but are expenditure on such is still tiny compared to many other money sinks. I can't find a value for current worldwide expenditure on ringtones, but based on some of the more recent number, I'd expect that worldwide more than $1 billion dollars is spent on that alone. The
total UK Space Agency budget, is currently under £200 million, which alone wouldn't pay for a single science mission (a few hundred million is typical of the cost to build most science missions).
