One thing about long aerospace missions like this with huge lead times that always gets me - you can spend years of your life working on a mission, only for it all to fail with potentially years until you can try again.
This is a refreshingly humanizing article, but is also one written from the perspective of a survivor. Imagine if the rover were actually lost. I asked the question "what would you do if the mission failed after all of this work? How could you cope?" to the folks at (now bankrupt) Masten Aerospace during a job interview, and maybe it was a bad time to ask such a question, but I didn't get the sense they knew either. "The best thing we can do is learn from failure," one of them told me. An excellent thing to do, but not exactly what I asked. This to me stands out as the defining personal risk of caring about your job and working in aerospace. Get too invested, and you may literally see your life's work go up in flames.
Did they have a narrow launch window they couldn't afford to miss? I'm not talking about missions where you eat a big monetary loss on the launchpad and try again, I mean missions which rely on planetary alignments that may not happen again for years, or even the rest of your life, such as Voyager. Or even just missions where you launch successfully, but then after months (or years) of flight time the spacecraft is lost.
This is a refreshingly humanizing article, but is also one written from the perspective of a survivor. Imagine if the rover were actually lost. I asked the question "what would you do if the mission failed after all of this work? How could you cope?" to the folks at (now bankrupt) Masten Aerospace during a job interview, and maybe it was a bad time to ask such a question, but I didn't get the sense they knew either. "The best thing we can do is learn from failure," one of them told me. An excellent thing to do, but not exactly what I asked. This to me stands out as the defining personal risk of caring about your job and working in aerospace. Get too invested, and you may literally see your life's work go up in flames.