It's a interesting story, but the author may be overselling it. It's not a _failure_ story, nor was it a 500M mistake. I get that it was really stressful and the mistake could have cost him the job, but it didn't; it also didn't cost NASA anything other than a few hours of work (which, during testing, I would guess it's expected).
When I'm asked to share failures, I'm usually not thinking about "that one time when I almost screwed up but everything was fine", instead, I'm thinking of when I actually did damage to the business and had to fix it somehow.
“My quasi-$500M Mars rover mistake” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
But, to your point, it is still a failure story that _could_ have lead to a much worse outcome than it did. The fact that it didn’t was mostly due to luck.
When I'm asked to share failures, I'm usually not thinking about "that one time when I almost screwed up but everything was fine", instead, I'm thinking of when I actually did damage to the business and had to fix it somehow.