To Boldly Go, Someday

BEND, Ore. —  Rocket Guy is way behind schedule.

If things had worked out as planned, he’d already be the first person to single-handedly launch himself into the stratosphere. He’d be making the talk-show rounds, telling audiences about how this slightly wacky toy inventor took a childhood dream and made it a reality. He’d be bragging about how he boosted himself 30 miles straight up in a rocket he made in his home workshop.

Or, perhaps he might be dead. Rocketry, after all, is fraught with peril.

But being behind schedule doesn’t seem to bother Brian Walker, a.k.a. Rocket Guy, because what’s the rush? Just saying he’s planning to blast off has made him something of a cult figure and talk-show regular anyway.

He’s appeared on “I’ve Got a Secret” and “To Tell the Truth.” His Web site counter has chalked up more than 14 million hits in the last two years. He’s even picked an appropriate theme song: Kirby Swatosh’s “Spaceship.” The opening line is “I’m building a spaceship in my backyard.” Walker has dubbed that backyard the “rocket garden.”

All this without having yet built the rocket that will take him into space. In fairness, the 45-year-old Rocket Guy has been slowed by all the media attention. And he’s been very distracted of late, given the fact that his bride-to-be--the one he found on the Internet--is due to arrive from Moscow late next month.

Until then, he’ll work on the launch details. When it’s completed he’ll tow his 24-foot rocket to the launch site--wherever that ends up being--with a Mercedes sport utility vehicle. He’s built a sizable geodesic dome where he will assemble the big one that will carry him into space. When he builds it, and he swears he’s going to, the rocket will have a main engine with 12,000 pounds of thrust and weigh about 10,000 pounds when fully fueled and manned. Another outbuilding on his central Oregon compound contains an all-but-complete half-scale test rocket as well as a spacious office. Another still holds the equipment he will use to purify his rocket fuel. That will be hydrogen peroxide. As in the stuff used to sterilize cuts. But in purified form it is a powerful propellant that was used to send German V2 rockets toward Britain during World War II. It will also burst into flames if it touches anything organic.

Burned Through $350,000

This has not been a cheap undertaking, though chump change compared to the $20-odd million paid by American Dennis Tito and South African Mark Shuttleworth for their space rides with the Russians. Walker figures he’s burned through $350,000 during the last two years without so much as a test rocket leaving the Earth.

He’s been to Russia for cosmonaut training and purchased a spacesuit from them for a bargain-basement $15,000. (He couldn’t even get American manufacturers to talk to him.) He’s built a centrifuge, powered by a small airplane engine, in his backyard so he can experience the G-force of a space launch. He’s spent months welding, soldering and building molds and learning about rocketry on the fly. And he has lovingly built the test rocket, down to the engine that will theoretically power him to an altitude of 15,000 feet. From there, he will skydive back to Earth. If all goes well, that is.

“I’m building a dream,” says a somewhat beefy, bearded Walker. “And that’s what made this country great.”

All of this would not be possible, of course, without the toys. Walker has invented dozens of toys over the years--things like air-powered bazookas and laser gizmos and things that whirl around and glow in the dark. The royalties from the toy sales have provided a nice financial cushion--in the million-plus range--that allows Walker to pursue the rocket dreams he’s had since he was a boy growing up in Portland.

But life was not always so kind to Rocket Guy, a dyslexic with attention deficit disorder who squeaked his way through high school and dropped out of college. A series of dead-end jobs followed, even as he pursued his dream of being an inventor.

Early creations included a hovercraft, its only flaw being that it was hard to turn. There was the collapsible stretcher that evoked virtually no interest from its logical buyer, the military. And then there was the year and a half he spent on a remote Fijian island building a recreational two-person submarine. The only problem with that was that once submerged, it tended not to surface. With that kind of track record, Walker’s inventive future looked bleak, indeed.

“My failures were so great, I had to move back in with my folks and start all over again,” he says over dinner at a local eatery. “People looked at me as someone who couldn’t make it.”

In 1990, Walker switched his sites from big, ambitious projects to the smaller world of toys, a place where manufacturers are always looking for the next gimmick. And it was here that he found his calling. In 1994, Walker licensed his first toy, a laser light that was an instant success and was produced in three different versions--the Mini Laser Light, the Triple Beam Laser Light and the Starship version. Next came the Alien Orbiter, a “lung”-powered gyroscope. Suddenly, Walker had positive cash flow. Six years ago he bought the log cabin in Bend, along with 13 acres of land, and began creating his own little utopia that he calls Brian’s World.

It’s at the end of a road dotted with spacious homes and evergreens, an isolated space where his only contacts with neighbors are when he chooses to have them--and that is not often. Here, he drinks coffee until noon as he fiddles with some new toy or rocket project. He usually runs into town for lunch and dinner, never having learned the ways of the kitchen. He has a string of restaurants where the hostesses and the barkeeps know him by name.

In the early summer of 2000, Walker announced his intent to build a rocket that would carry him into space by the fall of 2001. Not into orbit, but straight up to Earth’s outer atmosphere before returning via parachute.

The first newspaper story about him ran in the Portland Oregonian, and Walker admits he was looking for a little publicity at the time. But he says he never dreamed the swarm of media requests would be so overwhelming, that and the thousands of e-mails that have come his way from all parts of the world. He’s tried to answer each one.

John Barr of Scotland, in an e-mail declares Walker’s idea to be brilliant: “It’s people like you we need with the vision to challenge preconceptions about space being the domain of national governments. You’re right, space belongs to ordinary people too.”

Then there’s this from a woman named Lisa: “If I weren’t married to a nutty inventor type already, I’d be high-tailing it to Bend right now.”

But Walker is already spoken for by Natasha Astankina, whom he found on an online service called A Foreign Affair. He spotted her after reviewing thousands of online resumes of Russian women hoping to attract interest from American men.

“When I saw her, I knew she was the one,” Walker says of their first meeting in Moscow. They needed a translator for that date, but they had already covered a lot of ground in the 1,000 or so e-mails they had exchanged. Astankina used a computer program to crudely translate Russian into English for those early contacts. She will be bringing her 8-year-old son, Sergey, with her. In anticipation of the boy’s arrival, Walker has installed an aboveground swimming pool just outside the house.

Walker leads the way around his compound, first cranking up the centrifuge, then setting it in motion by remote control. Next, he demonstrates the model of what will be the nosecone of his Rocket Guy rocket, where he will install himself for the flight. As the plan is supposed to work, the rockets will provide enough boost to get him into space, where he will experience a few seconds of weightlessness before beginning his descent. By then, the main rocket will have disengaged, leaving only the manned nosecone equipped with parachutes. His preferred launch site at the moment is the sparsely populated northern Nevada desert.

A Sore Point With Fiancee

And what does his bride-to-be think of all this rocketry? It’s one of the few sore spots in the relationship. Astankina says she sent Walker an e-mail in which she asked him not to launch himself. After a long delay, Walker wrote back that the project was his “baby” and that he intended to proceed.

“It is his dream of all his life,” says Astankina by e-mail. “He is going to do this.”

Officialdom, meanwhile, is watching from the wings. Walker met earlier this month with a group from the Federal Aviation Administration, which must clear the airspace for the launch. Walker says they mostly listened to his presentation. More important, they didn’t dismiss him as a kook.

“They treated me with absolute respect,” he says. “They didn’t think I was a crackpot.”

And what of NASA, the American space agency that has launched every manned U.S. rocket?

Spokesman John Petty has a vague recollection of hearing about Walker, but that’s all.

“Certainly, we hope anyone who does this sort of thing does it safely and doesn’t come to any harm,” he says.

As for Walker, he thinks an unmanned test flight might be possible in the fall. The coming of his new family has made him perhaps slightly more cautious about the manned flight. After all, he says, he doesn’t want to do anything that will leave his bride a young widow. Still, he doesn’t want to delay so long that he’s tagged as all talk and no action. Rocket Guy says he wants to do what he’s promised and move on. His bottom line: “I want to get it over with.”