Five years, hundreds of models, and millions of dollars later, Slat and his team of scientists and engineers launched the system in October 2018. And…it didn't work. Did they give up? No way! They improved the design and tested it out in June 2019. Success! The system rounded up huge amounts of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Slat and his team aim to gather half the patch by 2024. Why did the author include this passage?