Tada! Having now finished the rocket, I have added Lego skills to my resume, thereby doubling its length.

If your day was slow yesterday and you spent time wondering why there was no Day 6 report, it’s because I decided to break with tradition and rest on the sixth day, instead of the seventh, in order to build the suspense as to my progress on the rocket. Thousands of years from now archeologists will posit a multitude of hypotheses regarding the mystery surrounding the lack of documentation of events on the missing day. Books will be written. Songs will be sung. Conspiracy theories will abound.

My mission complete, and my confidence soaring, it’s now on to the next journey. I’m thinking about solving the Riemann Hypothesis, or one of the other six Millennium Prize Problems, and thereby receiving the million dollars (per problem) that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered. Something to do while waiting for my vaccination.

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.

I’m done building the first stage of the rocket, sort of. When I picked it up to admire my handiwork, I thought I felt something move, and it wasn’t the earth. So I, very carefully, shook my creation, very lightly. I figured that’s what they would do at Cape Canaveral, though, while my model weighs 5.5 pounds, an empty Saturn V weighs about 188,000 kilograms. In pounds, that translates to really, really heavy, so maybe the real engineers use different methods to check things out.

Anyway, I heard a tiny clatter, clearly caused by gremlins (see The Twilight Zones’ Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode), which sounded like it might be emanating from a small, loose piece floating about somewhere in the bowels of the cylinder (much like the cartilage in my knees), with no way to extricate it short of disassembling the entire thing (much like my knees).

If I were a surgeon who accidentally left something clattering around inside a patient, it would be called a retained object and I’d get sued for malpractice. According to a 2013 letter on the Public Citizen website, the estimated number of objects left behind after surgery each year ranges anywhere between 1 in every 1,000 and 1 in every 18,000 surgeries. Ouch.

I couldn’t find any statistics related to objects left inside rockets. However, I did discover that one can buy rocket insurance to protect against damage or injury to the person or property of another or failure of a launch. Good to know.

Based on my current experience, I’m wondering what the NASA engineers did when they were building the Saturn V and looked around and inevitably realized that they had some leftover parts. Probably figured someone was playing a joke on them and had a good laugh. But then perhaps started wondering about the possible effect of an oopsy on the first stage of a projectile hurtling through the atmosphere at 6164 miles per hour.

Personally, I’m choosing to believe that the five, small, untouched pieces of my set that don’t seem to belong anywhere, other than out of my line of vision, aren’t crucial to the integrity of the rocket, and will be just fine in a bag, in a drawer, rather than in the first stage construction.

This attitude probably means that I am not a “steely-eyed missile man” and should not be trusted with assembling anything with moving parts. That said, to the naked eye, the rocket is starting to take shape, though I keep wondering whether I am noticing, but should continue to disregard, what might be an almost imperceptible lean of the structure. How important could a few tiny pieces be?

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” (Lao Tzu)

I successfully open the Saturn V box and dump the 12, numbered plastic bags (along with some bags within the bags) full of parts onto the table. I take a break.

Without even consulting the 200 pages worth of building instructions, I boldly rupture the bag labeled number 1, pieces scattering on the table, and note that the bags are constructed so that there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. I take a break.

I put together a few pieces to satisfy those skeptics who think that the mere opening of a bag, without injury, doesn’t deserve the credit I know it does. I note that the designers have gone to great lengths to create a myriad of shapes and sizes, not so much, I think, as a necessity for building the 39-inch tall rocket (the real one was 363 feet – wouldn’t fit in my unit), but as a way of very cleverly making it consist of exactly 1969 pieces, reflective of the year Tom Hanks or Neil Armstrong or somebody went to the moon. I take a break.

Tomorrow is another day and I’ll need my energy.