I’ve free climbed El Capitan, rafted the Class V Terminator rapids on the Fualleufu River in Chili, and told my mother that I wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving (okay, really only the last one – the most dangerous one), but I’ve never before experienced the magnitude of anxiety one reaches over the possibility that he’s one slip away from causing multiple days worth of work on a toy rocket to crumble in front of him like the Nazi’s head in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade after he drank from the wrong cup.

Nine bags of pieces down and only three left to go. Good progress, but the real moment of truth will come when I reach the last instruction, number 337, which will show me how to connect and stack the rocket’s five stages. As Isaac Newton might have said, if he had a better publicist, gravity is the enemy of height.