@academicchatter Just some nuance here. The fact that some things go off the rails, but you don't have a backup plan shows poor skill in scoping a project, and even more so poor skill in managing things.
If you can't recover from a failure, you didn't manage things right (lack of redundancy). There is high stakes research, but most of the time you know where things can fail and should know how to recover. If you don't, you're messed up.