Dr. McCammon has endured even more failures than this article shows. He has a smaller calorimeter that he launches on NASA's sounding rockets. I was a telemetry engineer on another mission while both of our payloads were at White Sands in launch preparation. Dr. McCammon told me that he had been trying to have a successful launch since 1998, but launch vehicle issues (guidance failure cost one launch, command uplink cost another) and experiment issues ( the calorimeter is relatively fragile) had resulted in four consecutive failures.

For all that though, he is an accomplished scientist and still had a positive attitude, which made me admire him greatly.