Brian Walker unveiled a new design for his rocket in spring of 2001. Walker writes, Due to the advice of many real rocket scientists who have been in contact with Rocket Guy the design has gone through some major re-working.
The only thing about launching himself to space that actually worries him, Brian Walker says, is the one-chaired centrifuge he's putting together in his Bend, Oregon backyward. It's 29 feet long and will spin him at 70 mph to get him used to the stresses of 6 G's. Credit: Mark Gamba. Click to enlarge.
Walker wraps one of his test fuel tanks with Kevlar tape, in preparation for determining if the tank can withstand a pressure of 500 pounds per square inch. The actual tanks will be 14 feet long. Credit: Mark Gamba. Click to enlarge.
Toy inventor Brian Walker stands at ground zero in his Rocket Garden, the complex he has built for his one-time flight to space. Behind him are his training centrifuge and a full-scale model of his fuel tanks and capsule. Credit: Mark Gamba. Click to enlarge.
Rocket Guy: Oregon Man Set for Self-Launch By Mary Roach Special to SPACE.com posted: 07:00 am ET 11 June 2001 ET
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Sometime in the spring of 2002, a man who has somehow become known to the world as "Rocket Guy" plans to launch himself 30 miles (48 kilometers) straight up in a rocket of his own making.
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Unlike NASA, Walker, a Bend, Oregon toy inventor, cant afford to build and launch test rockets. The first one he builds is the one hell fly in. He will be his own monkey -- just as he will be his own mission control, copilot, draftsman, flight engineer, pressurized-fuel-tank maker and sectional-fin engineer and builder, not to mention publicist. Brian Walker likes to do things his way.
For the past hour and a half, Walker has been sitting in a leather chair in his living room, drinking microwaved coffee and talking about his plans. He is 44, with resilient brown curls, live-wire blue eyes and the well-projected voice of a man who spends a lot of time talking over loud machinery. (In addition to building rocket parts and toy prototypes, Walker once built an entire two-man recreational submarine.)
Though possessed of a certain amount of huff and bluster, Walker is fairly humble when it comes to his present undertaking. He insists that what he is planning to do is not particularly difficult -- is not, in fact, "rocket science."
"What is a rocket?" he says. "A rocket is a device with more thrust than weight." We do the math: Walker and his rocket and fuel will weigh 10,000 pounds (4,535 kilograms); the rocket will produce 12,000 pounds of thrust. "If I have 2,000 pounds of thrust," he says, one forearm blasting off from the arm of his chair, "Im gonna go up. Since Im losing 90 pounds (40 kilograms) of fuel a second, Im going to just accelerate the whole time." Assuming hes done his calculations correctly, hell run out of fuel and coast to a stop at the edge of Earths atmosphere, just beyond the perpetual gloaming that precedes the cold black vacuum of space. At this point, hell activate a small thruster in the nose of his capsule (the empty fuel tank having dropped off) to turn himself head-down and into position for the unfolding of a giant airbag.
This will act as an airbrake to slow his fall, thereby reducing friction and surface heating of the capsule during reentry. Once back in Earths atmosphere, a jumbo custom-made parasail will unfurl and Walker will drift softly back to Earth, somewhere in the middle of an extinct lake bed in southeastern Oregon.
Much like Alan Shepards first suborbital flight, Walkers trip will last about 15 minutes. Here the similarity ends. Shepard splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean and was greeted by a couple of Marine helicopter pilots who hoisted him up and over to probing doctors and a phone call from President Kennedy on the waiting aircraft carrier Lake Champlain. When Walker approaches touchdown, a flatbed truck will have driven up underneath him to shuttle him over to a ring of bleachers, where hell step out of the capsule and wave to the cheering crowd while "12 Hooters girls run up and pour champagne" all over him.
The reverie is interrupted by a cuckoo clock on the wall behind us. It occurs to me that sometime during every media interview ever held in this room, the clock has interrupted Walker, saying, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!"
"Brian?"
"Yuh?"
"You should really turn that off when the press is here."
A tour of the facilities
Walker suggests a tour of his workshop and his backyard, a.k.a. the Rocket Garden, where a full-scale mock-up of the rocket stands. Here is where you begin to wonder just how simple or successful Walkers flight will actually be. The easy part of building a rocket is building the rocket. Somewhat trickier is building the machinery required to build the rocket. Walker shows me a site on the grounds where he plans to build a distillery to purify the hydrogen peroxide that will fuel his flight.
"You know," I offer. "You can buy that stuff at the drugstore pretty cheap." Walker carefully explains that the drugstore variety is about 3 percent hydrogen peroxide. He needs 90-percent purity.
Oh.
Walker opted for a monopropellant -- rather than a mixture of, say, liquid oxygen and kerosene -- because he feels its safer and simpler to deal with. Heres how itll work: Upon blastoff, the hydrogen peroxide will be forced from a pressurized fuel tank into a catalyst chamber containing a stack of silver screens; the contact with the silver will create a chemical reaction that will cause the hydrogen peroxide to suddenly expand by 600 percent, creating a burst of steam that provides the needed thrust. Since therell be no flames shooting out from the rocket, Walker feels theres less chance of explosion. "The worst that could go wrong is that Ill come back a blonde."
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