Allow me to wax philosophical for a moment. My wife is very emotion driven. She legitimately cried about the philae shutdown, and had to rectify how she "look

Allow me to wax philosophical for a moment. My wife is very emotion driven. She legitimately cried about the philae shutdown, and had to rectify how she "looked at" the shutdown to not feel sad about it, but I feel like my sysadmin background helps in this. These tools, as much as we attach emotion to them, are tools, extensions of the will of those who made them. A sysadmin will NEVER win in the long run. Our best success is averting failure yet another day; yet another day. Similarly an engineer will never build a tool that lasts forever. But each year is another accomplishment, another triumph of their competence against the increasingly likely probability that "everything is on fire." So less than poignancy, I see it as a trumpet call, a triumph procession. Each year is another year of spitting in the face of every absurd hardware bug, quantum event, cosmic ray, and meteor that'd love nothing more than to ruin some scientist's day. These missions to which we assign so much personality do not "die", so much as "manage to persist against all odds", and it keeps me in constant awe of the people who set out and succeed, even a little, at these endevours.