I got together all the materials I needed and spent an entire year, in the evenings after work, working on my rocket in the back yard. Every so often, my neighbour would come over and help me, for he had once been a little boy with his own dream of outer space.

After 365 days of building and checking systems and making sure everything was ship-shape, I was ready to launch. I strapped myself in and pressed the launch button on the control panel I had carefully constructed.

I got to Jupiter in that rocket. It worked exactly as I thought it would. In what seemed like a very short time, the king of planets stood ruddy and storm-tossed outside my port, like a rare pearl hanging in the emptiness of space.

My rocket landed perfectly on my return to earth. Nobody believed that I had been to Jupiter. Ha, I thought, I'll show them. I used up more than twenty rolls of film on my space voyage. Soon, the world will know of my astronautical triumph.

Wouldn't you just know it - when I got the prints back, I had forgotten to take the lens cap off.