A million miles from Earth, beyond the reach of any repair crew, the James Webb Space Telescope had to become itself before it could see anything at all. In the weeks following its Christmas 2021 launch, the observatory executed over 50 major deployment steps and cleared 344 identified single points of failure — any one of which could have ended the mission permanently. That it succeeded is not merely a triumph of engineering, but a testament to humanity's capacity to map its own fallibility with enough precision to transcend it.