[jacquesm]

Unlike say, the Apollo program, which had a guaranteed successful outcome?

The thing to realize is that these are some of the hardest things humanity has tried their hand on and if it all works that's a great thing for all of us, if it fails we will learn something and we'll go back to the drawing board (but we won't have a JWST and that's a significant loss, besides the obvious future calls of 'look at what happened to JWST' which will no doubt have negative impact on finding funding for future space missions).

Also, I think you're mistaken about people being 'proud about the 200 SPOFs', if they could have made it one less they certainly would have because everybody involved wants this to succeed. Think of these as the ones that they simply could not get rid of no matter how hard they tried.

[WJW]

Perhaps it's a case of "we're proud that we got it all the way down to only 200 SPOFs in the final design, the earlier designs were way worse".

[jacquesm]

There is a fair chance of that, actually. If you start enumerating the ones that are obvious even to lay people (one rocket, one satellite, one set of mirrors and so on) then this is probably an extremely impressive low number.

[shmageggy]

I've been binging JWST content and definitely recall John Mayer saying in at least one interview that 344 single points of failure was as low as they could get it. And I can believe it. If you watch some of the more detailed interviews, he always stresses how every design choice was heavily labored over and reviewed.

[jacquesm]

It's an absolutely amazing effort, from the design through all of the problems they had to deal with along the way to seeing it sit there on top of that booster. A few months from now we could be in a completely new era of astronomy.

[twistedpair]

> Unlike say, the Apollo program, which had a guaranteed successful outcome?

Apollo was wildly dangerous. Apollo 1 killed the whole crew. The contemporary calculated failure odds for a Saturn V launch were 1/8. Compare that to the current Dragon 2 projected LOC risk of 1/276 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Dragon_Demo-2#:~:text=NAS....

[Stratoscope]

I think GP was being sarcastic.

[jacquesm]

Absolutely. Those guys were laying their lives on the line with every launch.