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maybe it was measuring the current rather than the voltage as he thought, which would require putting it in series with the circuit

That stood out to me as well when I read the article.

The multimeter in the photo has the probes plugged into the volts/ohms jack, though. Maybe it was a different meter.

I figured this was going to be a story about trying to measure voltage with the meter set up on the 10A current range.

yeah i don't think he took a photo of the multimeter to use in the article before unplugging it. he didn't yet know it was important

So that it could be quickly and easily unplugged

Why would you not use a multimeter two weeks before launch? The two things are orthogonal to each other.