Plumber comes to my house and fixes an issue in 20 minutes and charges me $100. "Why so much," I ask. "It only took you 20 minutes." "Well," replies the plumb

Plumber comes to my house and fixes an issue in 20 minutes and charges me $100. "Why so much," I ask. "It only took you 20 minutes." "Well," replies the plumber, "It actually took me two decades to fix this, you just saw the last 20 minutes." In other words, there's a lot of talent at work here even if it was the "last two years." Worse, how often do these people get a space mission. Its competitive. Just because your mission blew up doesn't mean you get favored status next time you work on a proposal or team trying to get into space. You spent the past few years working, not writing grants, playing politics, publishing papers, etc and all the stuff it takes to get a space mission. You're not just years behind, but perhaps a decade (or more) and most likely you'll never work on another space mission again. Its a lot of pressure and heartbreaking. I don't think the tone here is overly dramatic. It think its pretty accurate. Luckily, this team got a chance to launch again. That's not always in the cards. Imagine if this was a planetary climate mission during this administration. It wouldn't launch again.