Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Human Error

You've probably seen Brian Walker on television. If not, you heard him on the radio. You saw him chatting with Conan O'Brien, or on Good Morning America. Or he was on with Howard Stern one morning.

He's the guy. That guy. You know, the first person to build his own rocket-yes, right there in his backyard in Bend, Oregon-and shoot himself into outer space.

He calls himself "Rocket Guy."

Yes, of course. That guy.

Now you remember. In the hundreds of radio and television spots, in the newspaper and magazine articles, you're heard the logistics. How his rocket is fiberglass, powered by a 90 percent solution of hydrogen peroxide exposed to a screen plated with silver.

"It's like when you mix vinegar and baking soda," Rocket Guy would tell you. "It's a chemical reaction. The peroxide hits the silver and it causes a catalytic conversion that changes it into steam. And the steam then expands. Basically, the peroxide turns to superheated steam of about thirteen hundred degrees and expands six hundred times in volume."

A blast of compressed air will assist the rocket's launch. It will go fifty miles straight up, then fall down, slowed by a parasail.

He's the rich toy inventor. Engaged to marry the beautiful Russian woman he met on the Internet and dated while training with Russian cosmonauts.

Yes, of course you've heard of him and his "Project R.U.S.H." Meaning: Rapid Up Super High. The guy with just a high school education. You probably heard him on Art Bell's radio show and then sent him an email. If you did, then you got an answer. Rocket Guy has answered thousands of your emails. Asking for advice about your inventions. Telling him how much your kid loves his toys. And, what's amazing is, he answered you. Maybe even sent you a toy.

He's your hero. Or you think he's a big-mouth fraud.

Yeah, that guy… What ever happened to him?

Oh, he's still there. Well, he is and he isn't.

If you sent him an email-at www.rocketguy.com-chances are it's still on his computer. If you sent him an email, you're a little part of the problem.

In December 2001, Rocket Guy was working in his shop, working on the hydraulic lift part of the trailer that would haul his rocket to the launch site. It's thirty degrees outside, and the high desert is ankle-deep with snow. The twelve acres where Brian Walker lives, a one-song drive from the center of town, is mostly pine trees and lava rock. He lives in a big log cabin. A short walk downhill are his garage and his shop buildings. Beside them is his "Rocket Garden," an array of equipment he built to train for his trip into the atmosphere.

Sticking out of the snow, you'll see bright red and yellow, foam and fiberglass prototypes for missiles and capsules and rockets. In his shop, the white walls are hung with the prototypes for toys he's invented. Brian Walker is big and bearded, and his part-time helper, Dave Engeman, is small and clean-shaven, and, with the snow and the toys, the pine trees and the log cabin, the two men suggest a workshop somewhere near the North Pole. More like elves than astronauts.

If you ask, Rocket Guy will take toys down off the wall and demonstrate the ones that he could never sell. "It's tough, trying to make toys these days," he says. "The Consumer Product Safety Administration is so anal about how something could be misused. In the good old days, you could buy toys that, if you misused them, you could lose an eye or a finger."

Here's a tented stretcher he designed for the army. Here's a go-cart the size of a suitcase. Showing you the failures, hundreds of plastic and wood prototypes stored in crates, he says, "I want to do a line of toys called 'The Better Tomorrow Toys. They're going to be designed so that if a child had an IQ below a certain level, they wouldn't survive the toy. So you weed out the gene pool at a young age. Stupid kids are not nearly as dangerous as stupid adults, so let's take them out when they're young. I know it sounds cruel, but it's a reasonable expectation."

He laughs and says, "Of course that's all a joke. Just like the line of toys I want to do for blind kids, called 'Out of Sight Toys'…"

At the rear end of the rocket trailer, he's mounting a steel tank. It sits below four tall pipes that will slip up, inside the rocket. At takeoff, high-pressure air from the tank, channeled through the four pipes, will give the rocket its initial lift.

"The blast of air gives it momentum," Brian says. "If I have a twelve-thousand-pound thrust motor and a rocket that weighs a thousand pounds with nine thousand pounds of fuel, then I have a takeoff weight of ten thousand pounds, and twelve thousand pounds of thrust. If the air launch gives me a boost, then I have zero weight, so the twelve thousand pounds of thrust is immediately applied to thrust so I leave the ground with a more positive attitude and a much more stable launch."

In a nutshell, that's rocket science. At least for the first test flight. Inside the rocket there's no controls so there's no chance of human error. Simple as that.

"I'm not a rocket scientist," Brian says. "Everything I'm doing is public knowledge. I'm using information gleaned from fifty years of the space program. My rocket is more or less a giant toy. It's a big toy on steroids."

He says, "The moment I open the valve to the engine, that's when you launch the air. I want the engine at full throttle before I release the air pressure. If for some reason the engine didn't fire at the moment I launched, I'd get about fifty feet up and then come back down. The parachute wouldn't help, and the weight would be so much I couldn't even separate the capsule from the fuel tank. The moment the engine throttle is opened, the compressed air goes."

Hydrogen peroxide turning to steam… A push of air-just like Brian's toy Pop-It Rocket, which you can buy at Target and Disneyland… And Brian himself standing upright in the nose of the thirty-foot-long rocket.

"When it launches-boom-I'm up," he says. "And when I get to apogee, the highest point, the nose cone pops off and a parachute comes out. Then, as I'm descending, two doors snap open and there's going to be a little catapult seat that just rolls me right out. And I skydive."

It's that simple.

He'll be traveling at mach 4 when the main engine runs out of fuel. His capsule will separate from the fuel tank and coast for four and one-half minutes, until he reaches peak height, at about six minutes after launch.

"The acceleration phase is ninety seconds," he says, "and the whole flight should last about fifteen minutes from launch to when I touch down."

Fins made of compression-molded Styrofoam will help stabilize the rocket, then drop off in two stages, getting smaller and smaller as the rocket gains speed. His first manned test rocket will travel fifteen thousand feet, almost three miles, straight up. Then straight down, more or less.

"It's not like I'm going to have a lot of stuff falling," he says. "I'm going to have eight fin sections, fluttering down like leaves. And that one fuel tank. And I plan to have the fuel tank recovered for posterity, because I plan on having my capsule and the fuel tank and the whole rocket hanging in the Smithsonian Museum or some other prominent air and space museum. I talked to the Smithsonian and they said, yeah, if I build and launch my own private rocket, and it's the first one, they definitely will hang it."

That's the plan, fifteen minutes of fame and then straight into the history books.

All this will take place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert-where the annual Burning Man festival is held-the only place that can accommodate the quarter of a million people Brian expects to attend.

This has been Brian Walker's dream since he was nine years old. His father took him to his first air show when Brian was twelve. Two weeks after he turned sixteen, he made his first skydive. In 1974, when he was eighteen years old, he was almost dragged behind the plane while making a static-line jump. He froze, his hands locked on the wing, and the plane had to land with him still hanging there. He didn't jump again for seventeen years.

About his education, Brian will tell you, "I'm dyslexic, and ADHD, and school was torture for me. I tried two terms in college, to take engineering, and it was more or less to appease my dad. I took two terms toward a mechanical engineering degree at OIT and decided, 'This is not what I want. The partying almost killed me. The only thing I could do to maintain my sanity was to stay as mind-altered as possible."

He tends to get plantar warts, and uses a plasma welder to burn them off. "It's great for removing warts," he says. "But it leaves a nice little crater in your foot. As quick as I can pull and release the trigger, it sends a pulse of plasma that vaporizes the skin. It hurts like hell."

He says, "I used a soldering iron once before."

For Brian, five hours is a good night's sleep. Despite new pillows and a down comforter, he's an insomniac, just like his dad. He has no hobbies, other than inventing. He doesn't use the Lord's name in vain and says a Britney Spears concert is just a sex show. And doesn't approve of the Harry Potter books, because of the witchcraft. He has no pet, not right now in 2001, but he had a flying squirrel named Benny that died of an aneurysm after nine years. After that, he had a sugar glider, explaining, "It's the marsupial equivalent of a flying squirrel." For the movie version of his life, he'd cast Mel Gibson or Heath Ledger.

"Growing up," he says, "I was just never a big sports person. I just had a feeling that I was viewed as being less of a man since I didn't know statistics about players of sports. I just have this really jaded view that sports has become artificially elevated to a level of importance that it shouldn't have. They seem to want to make an art and an entire lifestyle out of analyzing games and players. You go into every single bar in America and all they show on the TV is sports and sports shows. And I have to be honest, in every basketball game I've ever watched-and I've watched quite a few-I've never seen anything new. I'm just a little bit bothered by the fact that, if you're not an ardent, hardened sports fan who knows all the aspects of the game, then somehow you're not really a man's man."

In a sports bar, at lunch, he stops talking to watch a computer graphic on television showing an electromagnetic pulse "E bomb" explode over a city. He orders a Big Bad Bob Burger with an extra slice of raw onion. Even in December, he drinks ice water. He grew up in the Parkrose district of Portland, Oregon.

Over lunch, he complains about how American astronauts get a lifetime of training and experience at taxpayer expense and then make their fortune as celebrities based on that experience. Then, how wealthy American citizens have been slammed in the public mind for paying money to ride along on Russian space missions. How the dream of space travel needs to be opened up to people who don't want a lifelong military career.

He'd like to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.

At this point, in 2001, Brian's forty-five years old and engaged to marry a woman named Ilena (not her real name, for reasons you'll understand later), a Russian he met through a website called "A Foreign Affair."

This is the Rocket Guy you've already met. He likes cinnamon Altoids better than regular ones. He's flown in Russian MIG fighters and choked back puke while experiencing zero-gravity dives aboard the "Vomit Comet" plane used to train cosmonauts. He's never been married, but he's ready now.

"My goal," he'll tell you, "is to find a woman who will enjoy life without the necessity of feeling like she has to go out and prove something. That, unfortunately, is what so many women in this culture feel they need to do. The feminist movement in the late sixties and early seventies convinced women that motherhood and being a stay-at-home mom was a lonely existence and not important. Unless you had a career you weren't anything."

Over his hamburger, he says, "One of my missions in life is to do the most I can to foster U.S. and Russian relations. The Cold War's over. Get over it. These people are not our enemy. The Russians are people who want to be just like us. They really love America and love us and what we stand for. And they want to be just like us. I think having a Russian wife will make it inevitable that I find myself speaking in this role."

After lunch he checks his mailbox, and there's a check for $55.06 from a Scottish radio interview. The only money he says he's made from the landslide of Rocket Guy publicity.

This is the Brian Walker the media discovered in April 2000.

"I wanted to be called something," he remembers, "but I didn't want to be called 'Rocket Man. It was too formal-sounding. And too overused. 'Rocket Guy' has a whole lot more friendly sound to it. He's just like the guy next door. The man on the street. The name Rocket Guy just kind of stuck."

Beginning with one interview for a Florida newspaper, Rocket Guy was born, an international media celebrity doing two or three interviews each day. Getting so many phone calls his message system maxed out after the first hundred. His website had as many as 380,000 hits in one hour.

"Out of all the radio interviews I've done, there's only been two or three, maybe a dozen, where the radio personalities were trying to make me look like a fool," he says. "Even when I did Howard Stern, for a half-hour, he did not make fun of me. He did not make me out to be a kook. He made a couple references about 'am I getting laid more often now, but he didn't turn it into a giant penis, sex thing, phallic symbol."

Still, what goes up, must come down.

And even Rocket Guy would tell you: reentry can be a bitch.

Brian and Ilena met in person for the first time in April 2001. Two months later, they spent another two weeks together and became engaged. In July of 2002, Ilena and her eight-year-old son, Alexi, arrived in America on a fiancée visa.

"I didn't want to believe I could make that big a mistake," Brian says. "We had eleven-hundred fifty-five emails between us over a year-and-a-half period. I wanted to believe her so much that I was willing to take the chance, but as soon as we got married, on October 15, 2002, then things just got worse."

Ilena was fifteen years younger than Brian, leaving behind a 700-square-foot apartment she'd shared with seven other people in Russia. Brian had installed a swimming pool for her son. He'd agreed to pay for her $4,000 in laser eye surgery and $12,000 in dental work. He'd traded in his BMW roadster for a sedan. Still, they fought. She refused to speak English at dinner, or to get out of bed before eight in the morning.

Brian brought home a computer for her to use while Alexi was at school all day. Six weeks later, he asked her about the Web surfing she'd done…

"The worst websites were for bestiality and sex with animals," he says. "She had been spending an hour or an hour and a half at a time, several days a week, going to these sites. It was only six weeks between when we got the computer and when she left. I was severely despondent to think this woman who I had loved enough to bring from Russia and marry was that perverse. We're not talking about normal porno, I'm talking about stuff that would make you sick."

Six weeks into the marriage and she'd secretly placed online ads, looking for a new man, ideally an artsy type with long blond hair, living in a city loft-pretty much the polar opposite of brunet, bearded Brian in his log cabin.

"Ilena is a very beautiful woman, but she has no soul. She's soulless," he says. "I'm convinced I was nothing more than a ticket here. That's all."

In Brian Walker's mind, Project R.U.S.H. was connected with being Rocket Guy and being married to Ilena. "I was thinking-in my own little way-what a great way to bring the world together," he says. "To show cooperation and connection between former enemies. We used to talk about how the two of us could do a book together. We could write children's books in English and Russian. I could see a whole tree growing out of this with all these opportunities, and that was just squashed."

The first time he talked to her about her Web surfing, Ilena packed a bag, took her son, and moved in with a neighbor-a Russian man she's been living with ever since.

Brian says, "I've had a lot of guys email me, and their stories were almost identical. These guys believed there was love there, but once their wife had her residency or her green card, she was gone. Ilena didn't even wait that long. She left two months after we were married. She couldn't even play the game long enough to get legal status."

That's where everything fell apart. Brian didn't eat for eight weeks. He lost forty-five pounds, shaved his beard, and couldn't bear to work on the rocket.

"I've been working so hard for so long," he says. "You go back to before I started this rocket project and look at the fifteen years of abject failure. I built a submarine, but I never made it into a business. I'd succeed in one portion, but I'd fail at a different part. The same with my stretcher or my hundreds of other inventions. I would work nonstop for months and years on end. Then I started getting success in the toy industry, and instead of scaling back I jumped into this project, and at this point in time it's completely overwhelming me."

Another shock came in the form of the "X-Prize," an offer of ten million dollars prize money to the first private group to put a rocket into the atmosphere. And the sudden competition Rocket Guy now faces from well-funded and well-educated teams around the world.

Even the media attention had become a handicap. Some two thousand people have shown up at his door, wanting a tour. "I have a really hard time saying no to people," he says. "What's slowed me down the most over the past three years is my desire to appease people's requests. Whether it's the media. Whether it's reading and answering emails or inviting people out to see things. Or doing school fund-raisers. I go speak at schools quite a bit."

It's been quite a ride. Money. Fame. Love. All of it before the rocket even got to the launch pad.

Fast-forward to July 2003, and, day by day, Brian Walker is coming back. A friend introduced him to a woman, an American, a realtor his own age. Her name is Laura, and already her voice is on his answering-machine message. They've skydived, together. There's even talk about another wedding-after Brian's divorce is final.

And he still gets letters, hundreds of letters from kids, parents, and teachers who love his toys.

There in Bend, Oregon, work continues in the Rocket Garden. There's the centrifuge where Brian trains himself to endure G forces. There's the tower where he tests rocket engines. In a couple months he plans to launch himself three miles high in a test rocket. He plans to finish the geodesic dome he's started. And the observatory perched on top of it. Inside the dome, the rocket waits, painted two-toned, light and dark blue. Ready, on the trailer he was making back in December 2001. Back when anything seemed possible. Love. Fame. Family.

In a way, it's all still possible.

Instead of instruments inside the rocket, he only wants a flat-screen video monitor hooked up to cameras on the outside. Or video goggles he can wear.

He wants to build a rocket sled that will ramp up one side of the dome.

He wants to design a glider-type aircraft that can be catapulted from city to city.

There's a go-cart he's building, powered by twin jet engines.

And the jet engine he bought on eBay and rigged so its 1,600-degree exhaust will melt the ice in his driveway… "When this thing kicks to life, your nuts suck all the way up into your stomach," he says. "It's almost terrifying to see this thing come to life."

And there's corporate sponsorship to search for. "I'd love Viagra as a sponsor, because the rocket makes a damn good symbol for Viagra," Brian Walker says. "Much better than a race car."

There's so much work left to do.

He still needs to distill the nine thousand pounds of hydrogen peroxide. And answer the emails. In the log cabin, his Soviet-made space suit waits.

The whole world waits.

Yes, you'll be hearing a lot more from Rocket Guy.

A lot more.

If he's not the first private person into space, then he wants to pioneer high-altitude skydiving from rockets. He wants to launch space tourism, which will allow people to orbit the Earth in a station, like a cruise ship, and drop out of the sky to visit any place, like a port. He plans to write a book that explains his success as an inventor. He's designing a carbon-fiber cannon that will shoot three-hundred-gallon water balloons to put out forest fires five miles away.

Inside his forty-five-foot-wide geodesic dome, Brian Walker talks about the red, green, and yellow halogen lights he plans to install. He talks about his other dreams. Of being "Teleportation Guy" and instantly teleporting himself to Russia. Or being "Time Travel Guy."

For now, he says, "The only thing reasonable I think I can do is to shoot myself into space. I can't time-travel. I can't teleport myself."

Inside the cool, dark dome, away from the desert sunshine, alone here with his rocket, he says, "I want to have unique special-effects lighting, and I want to have speakers that will make reverberating sounds so I can do really cool presentations."

You see, the way Rocket Guy explains it, the goal-space travel, time travel, teleportation-isn't your real reward. It's what you discover along the way. The same way putting a man on the moon gave us Teflon frying pans.

"And," Brian Walker says, "I want to do my own kind of Kentucky Fried Movie type of thing. Remember the TV show Time Tunnel?"

He says, "I want to do Time Tunnel 2001 with 'Time Guy, and Time Guy's whole mission is to go back in time to nail significant historical babes so he can spread his genetic genes into the future. So he goes back to Egypt to get with Cleopatra, and the moment he arrives he turns around and he's just about to be trampled by chariots, so they zap him back to the future. And then he goes back to France to get with Marie Antoinette, and he materializes on the guillotine just as the blade is coming down. So every time this poor sap goes back in time, he arrives at a point where within seconds he's going to be dead. And, the poor guy, it ends up he never does anything…"