I was only an engineer on the sounding rocket program for a little under two years. Fortunately the two rockets I assisted with were successful, but there were payload failures while I was there that had to be investigated. The long days and nights some of my coworkers put in to investigate anomalies took a harsh toll on them.
A month or so after I left, the program had a complete launch vehicle failure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL9HEYuOWDU#t33m25s). The stress of investigating that caused four of the telemetry/power engineers working on that mission to quit within the several months following.
I mean, things go wrong. It's the one universal truth of any engineering process. Finding out why the thing that went wrong went wrong, and making sure that it doesn't go wrong in the future is just part of the job.
I work on an on-call rotation --- it's not as exciting as rocket science, which is both unfortunate and fortunate --- and yes, things go wrong; and one of the biggest rules of our process for when things do go wrong is 'Is it the end of your shift? Then hand off and go home. NO THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.'
If the process itself is unable to cope smoothly with something going wrong, then the process has gone wrong. (And someone should find out why it went wrong, and make sure that it doesn't go wrong in the future.)
One of the takeaways I had from my time working with rockets was that rocket science isn't even rocket science, most of the time. But, I am very biased because my experience was overwhelmingly negative.
I agree with you on all the rest.
