May 22, 2001 - Art Bell
02:52:12
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unidentified
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| From the high desert in the great American Southwest. | ||
| I told good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be across the world, and it is all of those things. | ||
| As well as the gray line, actually all of it. | ||
| When you think about it, the whole globe we're covering the globe. | ||
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unidentified
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Coast to coast to coast to coast to coast to coast. | |
| This is Coast to Coast A.M., actually, officially, and I'm Mark Bell. | ||
| Good morning from the island of Guam, commercially in the west, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole. | ||
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Here we are. | |
| Coming up in a moment, I may have on the phone the man, the first private man in the world, to launch himself into orbit from his backyard. | ||
| His name is Brian Walker. | ||
| They call him the Rocket Guy. | ||
| And all I can say is this. | ||
| You've got to get to my website right now. | ||
| It's artbell.com. | ||
| That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L dot com. | ||
| Go to Program tonight's Guest Info. | ||
| And all you do is click below the name Ryan Walker where it says related info, project photos from Brian Walker. | ||
| And he's provided two pages of wonderful layout, by the way, that Keith has done for me of a project that looks like it's getting there, maybe almost done. | ||
| This man is going to try and launch himself into space. | ||
| In a moment, I'll tell you all about it. | ||
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unidentified
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I'll tell you all about it. | |
| You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2001. | ||
| Music playing. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| This article appeared in the New York Post, and the moment I saw it, I thought, Brian is for me for sure. | ||
| Let me read it to you. | ||
| Dateline, Bend, Oregon. | ||
| Self-taught rocket scientist Brian Walker plans to shoot himself into space this fall in a $250,000 rocket that he built in his backyard. | ||
| For the past two years, Rocket Guy, as he's known locally, has been constructing Earth Star 1, the rocket that he hopes will carry him to the edge of space and then bring him back to Earth alive. | ||
| Quote, my whole mission is to show what a person can do on his own, says Walker, 44, a self-made millionaire who's invented dozens of mass market toys for children. | ||
| A college dropout who attended just two seminars of semesters rather of engineering school, Walker will be staking his life on how well he's been able to teach himself rocket science. | ||
| The launch will be from a 200-foot tower in a dry lake bed in central Oregon. | ||
| If all goes as planned, steam rockets, that's steam rockets and 12 Earthstar 1 motors will generate 12,000 pounds of thrust at liftoff, and in 15 seconds, it and Brian should be out of sight. | ||
| For the next 85 seconds, pure hydrogen peroxide will pour out of a giant fuel tank and over a silver screen, creating a violent chemical reaction that will push the rocket upward at four times the speed of sound, about 2,200 miles per hour. | ||
| Can you imagine that? | ||
| At an altitude then of about 30 miles, the fuel tank will detach and parachute back to Earth, hopefully to be used again. | ||
| Momentum will carry Walker and his capsule up to 32 miles, where he will indeed experience several moments of weightlessness and then begin to fall back toward Earth. | ||
| During re-entry, a giant airbag will deploy to slow the descent. | ||
| Once the capsule slows, a massive parachute will then open and Walker expects to drift down to the lakebed. | ||
| According to his plans, a pickup truck will be waiting to drive him to a group of bleachers where fans and 12 Hooters bar girls will then pour champagne all over him. | ||
| Walker shrugs off any talk of danger. | ||
| He screws, I die. | ||
| I'd rather die trying this than spend the next 40 years bitter. | ||
| I never made the attempt. | ||
| The only glitch could be the FAA, which has demanded, apparently, that Walker produce a flight plan and details of his rocket design before it issues a permit for his launch. | ||
| But Walker says, if they don't grant me permission to launch, I'll just take the whole thing to the border, across the border, into Mexico. | ||
| So there you have it. | ||
| And again, one more time, I remind you as we begin this interview that Mr. Walker's photographs, very impressive indeed, are on my website right now at artbell.com. | ||
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You've really got to see this, trust me. | |
| Go to artbell.com. | ||
| Go to program. | ||
| Last time I'm telling you, tonight's guest info. | ||
| And right below Brian Walker's name, click on related info, project photos from Brian Walker. | ||
| And we'll talk about the photos as we go. | ||
| Now, having said all that, here, ladies and gentlemen, is Brian Walker. | ||
| And my first question for you is, have you lost your mind? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Have you found one? | ||
| How are you doing, Brian? | ||
| I'm doing great, Art. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| Well, I'm still alive, and I don't know if you heard my first hour. | ||
| I caught part of it. | ||
| I was trying to get ready for so I could. | ||
| Did you hear the part about the Ohio blue-tip matches? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| When I was a kid, I made a lot of rockets, Brian. | ||
| Oh, okay, yeah. | ||
| And CO2 cartridges. | ||
| I used, well, no. | ||
| I made scale models out of cardboard and then metal. | ||
| They were more bombs than rockets, Brian. | ||
| But I used Ohio Blue Tip Matches as fuel. | ||
| It's all I could figure out. | ||
| So I would break off millions of these little suckers and then cram them down into the body of the rocket. | ||
| And the cramming part, with Ohio blue-tip matches, the cramming part is the danger part. | ||
| And I eradicated actually a whole side of my mom's rug in a room. | ||
| So, you know, I dabbled a little bit, but you, you're going for the real thing. | ||
| Brian, we need some history. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You're a millionaire, it says, in here. | ||
| Well, that word gets so overused. | ||
| I do okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, you've got enough money to be doing this. | ||
| So anyway, you made some money, I guess, selling children's toys or inventing them or what? | ||
| Yeah, I've always been an inventor, and I spent the earlier years right out of high school, the first 10 years or so, working on some really serious major projects, like a little two-man submarine for recreational use, and those kinds of projects that were huge undertakings and never got me anywhere. | ||
| And then about 10 years ago, I focused my efforts on the toy industry because for an inventor that's prolific, the toy industry is great because they're constantly looking for new products. | ||
| And so I started focusing my energy there. | ||
| And about eight years ago, I sold my first toy, and I've got about a dozen or so now on the market. | ||
| So that's how you made your money? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That was the practical part of Brian Walker's life. | ||
| That was like part of a small slice, which might be considered a practical side, but yes. | ||
| So when did you get the scheme of going into space? | ||
| I mean, when did this dawn on you? | ||
| Oh, this has been, you know, my earliest memories as a child going back to, you know, the 5, 6, 7 age bracket was the beginning of the space program. | ||
| And to me, the idea of sitting on top of one of those rockets, the Mercury's, the Gemini, the Apollo, and blasting into space was just the greatest thing you could do. | ||
| And I wanted to be an astronaut. | ||
| But I'd say by the time I had reached the eight, nine-year-old age bracket, I just kind of had the sneaking suspicion that I was never going to get selected. | ||
| Because when you looked at the astronauts that they were picking in those days, they were career military. | ||
| They were top of the top of the top. | ||
| And I don't know, I just had some inner voice saying you'll never get there that way. | ||
| And I thought that I would just simply grow up and build my own rocket. | ||
| So this has been a dream. | ||
| It's been kind of, you know, in the background of my life for as far back as I can recall. | ||
| And because of that, I've always had a passion for the space program, watching the new developments in the aerospace and aviation fields. | ||
| And I've kind of watched what's been developed over the past 40 years and, you know, pick the things I like and discard the things I don't like and apply them to what I'm trying to accomplish. | ||
| Cherry-picking. | ||
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unidentified
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Cherry, yeah, exactly. | |
| And a couple real quick things here. | ||
| I just want to make sure that I am not attempting to go orbital. | ||
| There's a very huge distinction between what I'm doing and the attempt to go orbital. | ||
| Going into orbit would indicate I'd have to reach orbital velocities, which would be around 17,500 miles an hour. | ||
| Plus, I'd have to get to an orbital altitude, which would even a low orbit would probably be three times as high as I'm going. | ||
| Well, actually, it seems as though what you're going to do is more or less go straight up and straight down. | ||
| Because you said you're going to be coming down in the same dry lake bed that you launch in, right? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I'm going to launch above the dry lake bed, go straight up like an arrow, turn around, come straight down. | ||
| There will be some drift, obviously. | ||
| The parachute that I land with has a three to one glide ratio, so when I open the parachute up at three to four miles above the ground, I will have potential to glide back between nine and twelve miles to that starting point. | ||
| But in a very real sense, I'm trying to duplicate Alan Shepard, the first American in space. | ||
| He went on a 62-mile high, 15-minute suborbital spaceflight. | ||
| And I'm trying to recreate that, except I'm hopefully going to be able to go a little bit more than half as high as he went. | ||
| Still, this is, I mean, you're basically sitting on top of a possible bomb. | ||
| Well, actually, that's one of the reasons I've chosen the type of propulsion system using peroxide. | ||
| Hydrogen peroxide in this purity, in 90% purity, is a very reactive chemical, and its reaction, obviously, is to produce a lot of steam. | ||
| And when it comes in contact with the catalyst, it produces, it expands 600% and comes out in the form of 1,300 degrees steam. | ||
| But it actually represents a very small chance of a cataclysmic type explosion. | ||
| The fuel itself could leak out, but you can't really ignite it. | ||
| It won't spontaneously combust itself unless it's acting with an oxidizer. | ||
| So it's not quite as dangerous as sitting on top of a biopropellant type rocket. | ||
| I didn't know hydrogen peroxide. | ||
| I knew that in its pure form it's extremely reactive. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| What do you cause it to react with? | ||
| Well, actually, it'll react with anything organic. | ||
| And of course, depending on what type of organic material it is, that has a lot to do with what the outcome is. | ||
| The catalyst that I'll be using in this particular motor Is a silver-based catalyst. | ||
| So if you picture a chamber packed full of silver-plated nickel screens and all these discs of, like think of a screen door in a window, and you cut out discs of that material and stack them up inside of a chamber, you spray the fuel through there and it hits that silver and that causes the reaction and it produces steam. | ||
| And the main motor, actually another little difference from what was in the story, I have one main motor that produces 12,000 pounds of thrust and that consumes 90 pounds of fuel per second. | ||
| All right, that's what's getting you from what point to what point? | ||
| Well that will burn, that will actually, at the beginning of the launch, the rocket itself is hurled upwards off of a pneumatic launcher. | ||
| And that will give it basically its momentum and the motor, from the moment the motor's firing, it's actually trying to lift all this dead weight because the weight is already in motion. | ||
| But that engine will run for between 85 and 90 seconds and it's during that time that I accelerate to a little over Mach 4. | ||
| Holy smokes. | ||
| Then probably at around the 20 mile mark actually is where I will separate the main fuel tank. | ||
| Now how does that acceleration rate compare to that which, let's say, the shuttle people go through? | ||
| I believe, and again, don't quote me on this because I know this sounds a little funny to a lot of people, but I don't follow a whole lot of what goes on with NASA. | ||
| Their acceleration, I believe, takes them, I think, what, 10 minutes to reach orbit? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's probably going to be comparable. | ||
| I'm going to initially have quite a few Gs. | ||
| I'm going to be pulling four Gs at the launch. | ||
| Whereas they don't. | ||
| I mean, their launch is very slow by comparison. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're pulling around two G's mostly. | ||
| You're going to be like shot out of a gun. | ||
| Well, I'm going to launch with about four to five Gs initially, then it'll slacken off a little bit, then it'll increase again. | ||
| I'll experience a maximum of six Gs. | ||
| That's a lot of Gs. | ||
| What's the, what actually, you said there's going to be a pneumatic launcher. | ||
| describe that your rocket is going to sit in something that's going to no fire and have a These sleeves are carbon fiber sleeves, and they slide over barrels very similar to the way a paper wrapper is over a soda straw. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Okay, there's these four 8-inch diameter barrels that are 20 feet long, and the rocket sits inside the four of these. | ||
| And the carbon fiber sleeves that are attached to the fuel tank ride over these giant tubes. | ||
| Sound like a straw with one end off. | ||
| You blow it. | ||
| It's exactly the same thing, except I've got four of these around the fuel tank, so it's going to have the proper. | ||
| It's going to launch the thing evenly. | ||
| And what happens at about 50 pounds per square inch of air pressure, which is relatively small amount of air, it's not high pressure. | ||
| But there's 200 square inches of surface area in those four tubes. | ||
| So that right there gives a 10,000-pound kick in the pants, which makes it a lot easier for the rocket motor to add to the... | ||
| How tall is your rocket going to be? | ||
| The capsule that I sit in is about 10 feet long. | ||
| No, that's a capsule, but I meant the entire thing at launch. | ||
| Okay, well, I was just breaking it down to its components. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| It stands about 26 feet tall. | ||
| 26 feet tall. | ||
| And so 10 feet of that is in the capsule, and the rest is in the fuel tank and the engine assembly. | ||
| And you, of course, are going to be up at the very top. | ||
| I'll be up at the very top. | ||
| The main concern with this whole thing, obviously, is stability. | ||
| The most dangerous thing I'm going to encounter is if the first few seconds of launch I am not stable, that's where my greatest risk comes in. | ||
| Because once I get above a certain point, the higher I get, the more of a safety factor I have because I have more time to deal with problems. | ||
| And by the way, have you allowed for that? | ||
| In other words, if once you've gained enough altitude, there is a sudden problem, do you have any escape route? | ||
| I've designed this thing backwards from my survivability first and then mission success as second. | ||
| So on the way up, at any moment during the flight, if something goes wrong, there's only one lever I have to pull, and my hand is positioned on it so that the G-forces would normally want my arm to come down and pull the lever. | ||
| And the only thing preventing that from happening is a little button that my thumb's on. | ||
| So if I pull that at any given time, it immediately shuts off the main engine, and it activates the separation device that separates the capsule from the fuel tank, and then the little engines, the little rocket motors on the capsule would fire and immediately deploy an emergency parachute. | ||
| So all the way along, no matter what might happen, the capsule has two completely separate and independent parachute recovery systems, and I'm going to be wearing a spacesuit with two parachutes on my person. | ||
| So if I get down to an altitude and everything with the capsule has gone haywire, there's a very positive removal system that allow me to escape the capsule and take my chances in a free fall. | ||
| So then you're in an aborted situation, presuming you've got enough altitude, your chance of survivability is what percent? | ||
| Oh, I'll tell you the truth, I will not launch in this thing. | ||
| If I think, well, there's a slight chance that I'm not going to survive it, I won't launch. | ||
| I won't launch unless I know that. | ||
| Well, Brian, you know there's always a slight chance you won't. | ||
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Well, that's true. | |
| And every time I get in my car and head over to the Cascade Mountains, I know that there's a good chance I might not make it to my destination. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm not sure if it's really fair to compare your average off-the-treadmill automobile with a rocket that's being launched for the first time. | ||
| That might not be totally fair. | ||
| Brian, hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the alley. | ||
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This is Premier Network. | |
| that was our bell hosting coast-to-coast a m on this somewhere inside yeah My heart is on fire. | ||
| My soul take the wheel and swim. | ||
| My love is alive. | ||
| My love is alive Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah There's something inside that's making me crazy. | ||
| I'll try to keep it together. | ||
| Explanations Should I tell you that you came In the era of the kind Outro Music She doesn't give you time for questions as she locks up your head. | ||
| And you follow Diana's sense of which direction can wait for this thing. | ||
| On the floor, never fucking stop. | ||
| But the hint that she leads you to be set up your mind. | ||
| Just walk away for one of those. | ||
| The year of the cast The year of the | ||
| cast You are listening to Art Bell somewhere in time tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| Brian Walker is my guest. | ||
| They call him the rocket guy. | ||
| And for good reason, he's building a rocket. | ||
| He plans to go to space and come back down alive. | ||
| And we've got photos of his rocket on my website, artbell.com. | ||
| I'm telling you, you must see what we are about to discuss. | ||
| So go to artbell.com. | ||
| Program tonight's guest. | ||
| Click on the photos. | ||
| There's two full pages of them provided by Brian of what he's got. | ||
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I have reverence for the Sax. | |
| Anyway, Brian will be right back. | ||
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This time. | |
| Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Art Bell Somewhere in Time All right, well back now to Brian Walker. | ||
| Brian, welcome back. | ||
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Hi. | |
| How long have you been working on the rocket now? | ||
| Oh, I started off, let's see, well, about six years ago is when this dream kind of caught up with me. | ||
| Once things started taking off with my toys, it kind of came back at me and I started making the plan at that point as far as, okay, you know, what am I going to use for fuel? | ||
| What's my goal here? | ||
| What can I build? | ||
| What can I expect to do? | ||
| And so I started working on it from that point. | ||
| And then about three, well, I bought this place four years ago and the first thing I did was build a giant shop so I could start, you know, I needed a place to build it, obviously. | ||
| I actually began in earnest about three years ago. | ||
| And for the first year and a half, probably for the first two years actually, most of my efforts went into creating my surroundings and outfitting my shop and building a test area for testing the rocket motors and being able to put the rocket up on a large tower so I could work on it vertically and suspend all the parts. | ||
| And so a lot of the work I've been doing up to this point has just been getting to this juncture where I can actually begin working in building the components themselves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Have you test-fired any scale models? | ||
| Not scale models. | ||
| I am right now working on a scale model that is more for visuals as opposed to real test. | ||
| I'm going to be launching this thing with a smaller fuel tank that carries one-third the amount of fuel on a much smaller test. | ||
| I actually, the actual date for my launch is next May. | ||
| I had originally planned on launching by August or September of this year, but once I went public last summer, I've done over 250 radio interviews and over 35 TV spots. | ||
| Oh, it's just been nonsense. | ||
| I did three radio interviews today. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And I've done it from all over the world, from South Africa to Ireland to Iceland to Japan. | ||
| I get called day and night from radio stations. | ||
| Let's do an interview. | ||
| And in fact, I got booked on the Howard Stern show today, which should be an interesting experience. | ||
| You're going to be on Howard later today? | ||
| No, no, they booked me today for June sometime. | ||
| Oh, you'll enjoy Howard. | ||
| Yeah, that's going to be an interesting experience. | ||
| Or Howard will enjoy you. | ||
| Yes, but so anyway, I put the launch off until May of 2002, but I'm hoping by September to be launching the actual capsule with a much smaller fuel tank that's going to just allow me to do a dry run and make sure it gets over that hump, that first six to ten second hump. | ||
| That's where my greatest danger is. | ||
| In other words, if something goes wrong As you're being blown out as a straw. | ||
| That was a good visual for me. | ||
| As you're being catapulted, actually, into the air and the main engine ignites. | ||
| Do you actually start the ignition? | ||
| Don't start the ignition prior to the launching of the catapult. | ||
| Because what that basically does is: have you ever watched the space shuttle when it takes off just creeps and creeps? | ||
| And if you consider the amount of fuel it has consumed, just getting itself up to that first 100 mile an hour speed mark, it's an incredible amount of fuel. | ||
| And my theory has always been the faster you can accelerate a rocket before you have to use its own engines, its own fuel supply, the smaller the amount of fuel that you will require. | ||
| And you also gain a safety factor by already having reached aerodynamic stability. | ||
| i really could have been that's right i'd build a much much larger launch of them the one i'm having met done now so you would feel more comfortable with a larger Do you remember that motorcycle guy who's going to jump the Grand Canyon? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
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Evil Kenil. | |
| Evil Kenil. | ||
| Somebody designed a rocket motor, I believe, for his cycle. | ||
| Robert Truex. | ||
| Was it Robert Truex? | ||
| Yes, I believe he's the one who did that. | ||
| What went wrong? | ||
| Well, from what I understand, what went wrong was they had not taken into factors the amount of g-forces, and basically what happened, his hand, and of course, like I said, these are reports I've heard, I don't know if they're true, but from what I understand, his hand slipped off the lever that was to fire the parachute system much earlier than it was supposed to. | ||
| Because it did go off the ramp, and it did launch, but the parachute came out almost immediately, and the whole thing parachuted down into the Snake River. | ||
| I don't believe it was a, I think had that not happened, I think it would have been very successful. | ||
| Hydrogen peroxide is a formidable fuel when used in this type of a thing. | ||
| Is that what he was using? | ||
| Yeah, it was the same type of a thing. | ||
| From what I understand, it was a hydrogen peroxide steam engine. | ||
| Because that's what, in essence, comes out of the nozzle is steam. | ||
| It's water vapor. | ||
| But when I saw him jumping the Grand Canyon, it's not like he was ever going to make it. | ||
| I mean, you could see he never had enough oomph to make it, it seemed like. | ||
| You know, he was more or less going down. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I have to honestly admit I did not see that happen. | ||
| But from what I understand, it was more... | ||
| The purpose behind it was a stunt. | ||
| And I know a lot of times people want to compare me to stunt people and stuff. | ||
| Yeah, but he probably wanted to live through this. | ||
| Well, I'm sure he did. | ||
| And just like with me, I have no desire to die early. | ||
| I'm trying to do this because. | ||
| You realize there are some who question that. | ||
| Well, that's fine. | ||
| And, you know, quite honestly, if there weren't people throughout history that were willing to do things that the rest of people thought was crazy, we'd still be living in caves right now. | ||
| You're damn right. | ||
| Now, you know what? | ||
| NASA's not going to like this. | ||
| They're just not going to like it. | ||
| Assuming that you're able to pull it off, there's going to be a lot of hand-wringing around because, you know, we spend, oh, gosh, you know, billions and billions and billions of dollars to get into space with the shuttle and to get the International Space Station up there. | ||
| And even the Russians, billions and billions and billions of rubles. | ||
| And so if you can do this for a quarter million, I don't know. | ||
| They're just not going to like it. | ||
| Well, they're not going to like it. | ||
| And there again, too, I want to be very fair in this whole thing also that, like I was saying at the beginning of the show, that what I'm attempting to do here is not even close to being an orbital flight. | ||
| I would not even attempt to do this if I was I would not even attempt to go orbital the way I'm doing this right now. | ||
| Well, yeah, I know, but you are talking about getting up 30 miles now. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 30 or 35 miles. | ||
| That's a very long way. | ||
| And you'll be weightless roughly how long? | ||
| Well, again, the weightless thing only is going to occur when I'm reaching the point of no, when I'm approaching zero momentum and then as I begin my descent, there'll be a brief time of zero G, but I'll be going mostly from an accelerating standpoint when I'm going to be under high Gs to a period of decelerating G's and then increasing again as I begin my descent. | ||
| There'll be a short, at least moment of ah. | ||
| Oh, there'll be that one point. | ||
| Kind of like when Roadrunner gets out at the end of as far as he can go into clear space. | ||
| And then he looks down. | ||
| And he's got a moment of ah. | ||
| And then he looks down. | ||
| No, that's the coyote. | ||
| The roadrunner always looks at the bottom. | ||
| The coyote, right? | ||
| Well, whichever. | ||
| You know what I mean, right? | ||
| His next stretch is, and he holds up a little sign that says the end. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I don't plan on bringing a little sign with me, though, that says the end. | ||
| At 35 miles, nobody would even hear you scream. | ||
| No. | ||
| Now, you've got a photograph. | ||
| The first photo. | ||
| I'm glad we got it up. | ||
| We finally got actually a picture of you. | ||
| In all the photographs you sent, you never really sent one of yourself until today. | ||
| I had to go out and step my camera on an engine hoist to get that picture. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| So it was done rather quickly. | ||
| Hastily. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Hastily. | ||
| What is that in the background? | ||
| That is the capsule you see up on the top. | ||
| That is the first form that I built. | ||
| Because a real quick explanation here. | ||
| What I'm doing is I build everything that I'm eventually going to be in. | ||
| All the components are built as a full-size form or a plug. | ||
| And then from that positive, I pull a negative, which is the mold. | ||
| And that mold then allows me to turn around and produce as many finished parts as I need. | ||
| So up there on that tower, you see the capsule that was the form that built the mold for the first capsule, which is also one of those pictures. | ||
| The blue capsule is the first capsule to come off the mold. | ||
| And that was more or less an ergonomic capsule that I used to establish seating position inside. | ||
| All right, well, before we even get to that, the second photo we've got up is an apparent aerial photograph of your, I don't know what to call it, compound. | ||
| It's my rocket compound. | ||
| Rocket compound. | ||
| Actually, I've renamed it the Rocket Ranch, formerly Rocket Round Round. | ||
| Quite impressive, actually. | ||
| Actually, I'm just looking at that picture right now. | ||
| It is pretty cool. | ||
| It is cool. | ||
| What took that? | ||
| A friend of mine, Rick, he has a little specimen. | ||
| He flew around and was taking that. | ||
| He took that picture. | ||
| That's really excellent. | ||
| Yeah, it really excelled. | ||
| And I'm getting ready. | ||
| I'm putting in a dome now, a geodesic dome, next to the black area where the lava rock is. | ||
| And that's where I'm going to do the final assembly of all the components. | ||
| Oh, it looks cool. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, the third picture down is this blue capsule. | ||
| And I guess this is where you sit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is the... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is the first castle that came off the mold that I built off the form you see on the tower. | ||
| In fact, if you go down one more picture, that's... | ||
| you not accepting the first one no i don't I, first of all, make no claims to being a genius or a rocket scientist or having all the answers. | ||
| I'm just someone pursuing a dream, and my dream was to put myself into space. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| So along the line, I've had people that have come to me and said, hey, you know, I think this is great. | ||
| However, you're overlooking something or you're proceeding with the wrong idea here. | ||
| And this project has evolved as it's grown. | ||
| Well, what was wrong with this capsule? | ||
| I mean, it looks pretty good to me. | ||
| Well, it looks really neat. | ||
| And it's the fins. | ||
| The fins are the problem. | ||
| That little capsule is going to be going way too fast to be giving that much surface area for aerodynamics to come into play. | ||
| A 2% or a 3% variation from one side of fin to the next doesn't mean anything when you're going 200 miles an hour, but at 2,000 miles an hour, the differences in the fins could cause all kinds of instability problems. | ||
| So one of the things I've done is redesign the capsule now without any fins, and it is an absolute bullet. | ||
| The form was built on a giant lathe, and it took about eight weeks of applying bondo and grinding it bondo off. | ||
| Bondo? | ||
| Yeah, for the form. | ||
| You've got to remember, I build everything in a solid form first, then I make a mold of it, and that mold is then what's used to build the finished part. | ||
| So I use everything from spray and insulation to bondo to plaster to plywood to foam. | ||
| To get the shape that you want, there's a number of different materials you can work in. | ||
| Bondo happens to be one of my favorites because you mix it up, and five minutes later it's hard. | ||
| You can sand it, you can grind it, you can do all the things. | ||
| But will Bondo actually hold up? | ||
| I mean, Bondo's what's put on car holes, right? | ||
| Right, but remember now, the bondo is only part of the. | ||
| No, I understand, but I mean, it is the bondo bondo we're talking about. | ||
| Right, we're talking about a regular gill bondo. | ||
| All right, will that hold up to your re-entry? | ||
| No, there will be no bondo in the finished rocket, only in the molds. | ||
| That's only in the forms, not in the forms in the molds. | ||
| I was worried. | ||
| No, the actual capsule will have an outer surface of a ceramic cloth. | ||
| It's like a composite carbon fiber, but it's actually ceramic. | ||
| And that's the outer surface. | ||
| Then there's several layers of carbon fiber, and then there will be three separate laminations with Nomex honeycomb. | ||
| The actual thickness of the hole will be about an inch thick, and that's composed of multiple layers. | ||
| How hot is it going to get? | ||
| It doesn't get very hot. | ||
| It's the speed that you're traveling and the density of the air, and then of course the time. | ||
| It's like if you hold your hand over a candle for just a second, you don't get burned. | ||
| If you hold it there for a minute, you're in trouble. | ||
| I'm going to accelerate for 90 seconds, then I'm going to begin to decelerate. | ||
| And then when I begin my descent, I'm going to accelerate for a while, and then I'll reach a point where the density of the atmosphere and the speed of the capsule will reach equilibrium, and then the atmosphere will actually begin to slow me down. | ||
| Well, I was very lucky. | ||
| My wife and I got to go to Paris in the Concorde. | ||
| We got to fly a little better than Mach 2. | ||
| And what I remember about that flight was, for one thing, I was tired. | ||
| And you know how you kind of put your head up against the window a lot of times when you've got a window seat? | ||
| You couldn't do that in the Concorde because when you touched the window of the Concorde, it was so hot, you couldn't keep your hand on there. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, there again, that kind of heat, there's a difference between heat that a human being can withstand and heat that materials can withstand. | ||
| And I'll experience the surface in certain parts of the capsule will reach a couple hundred degrees, but it'll only get there for a momentary time and then it'll begin to cool off. | ||
| A couple of hundred degrees. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's, we're probably looking at maybe in the area of 200 degrees. | ||
| That's the hottest it'll get at any given point, and then it begins to cool. | ||
| So it's not going to be a long enough period of time or a hot enough temperature that will actually cause any problems to the capsule. | ||
| So anyway, the main change was to redesign the capsule and remove the fins. | ||
| I've changed the windows a bit. | ||
| I have a much, much more, a much smaller window, and it's a much more structurally sound design. | ||
| Why are big windows not good? | ||
| Well, first of all, there's really not going to be a whole lot to see. | ||
| I'm going to be laying on my back pointed straight up the whole flight up. | ||
| Coming down, I'm going to be on my back looking up. | ||
| But isn't that one of the points of going to see what it looks like for a second? | ||
| Well, that's why that's thanks to the modern world of digital electronics. | ||
| I have eight digital camcorders with remote cameras built in at eight different parts of the rocket capsule and a fuel tank. | ||
| And in front of me in the capsule is a nice big flat display, liquid crystal. | ||
| So you'll be able to see it on. | ||
| I'll be able to click to whatever camera I need to and see it. | ||
| Oh, but Brian, I know it's just not the same. | ||
| While you'll have a wonderful record. | ||
| Oh, I'll have the window. | ||
| The windows are there, but again, remember, I'm going to be glued to my seat at 6Gs. | ||
| I'm not going to be able to sit up and look around. | ||
| Well, but what about that moment when you're as high as you're going to go? | ||
| That's when I'll be able to look out the little windows. | ||
| Oh, man, what a view that's going to be. | ||
| People have no idea. | ||
| We reached, oh, I forget what it was, 65,000 feet or so in the Concord, maybe 70. | ||
| And you could see the curvature of the Earth. | ||
| You could begin to really see the curvature of the Earth. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| Well, I just returned. | ||
| I was in Russia, and I went up in a MiG-25. | ||
| Oh, you did? | ||
| And went up to a little over 80,000 feet at Mach 2.5. | ||
| And yes, up at that altitude, the sky was pitch black above me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you could see the atmosphere change from blue to black. | ||
| In fact, you've got, if people scroll way down, you've got a photo of that, don't you? | ||
| There's a couple pictures there. | ||
| Yeah, here's a couple of shots from the MiG-25 at 80,000 feet. | ||
| That's really, really, really cool. | ||
| That was, to quote Ferris Bueller, if one has the means and the wherewithal, I highly recommend it. | ||
| Was that fun? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| You first walk around and look at the size of this thing. | ||
| It's a massive jet. | ||
| This thing doesn't have any aluminum or titanium in it. | ||
| It's all stainless steel. | ||
| The exhaust nozzles are almost five feet in diameter. | ||
| There's two of them. | ||
| And the intakes alone could suck up a cow or a Volkswagen. | ||
| And when you climb up and get in this little tiny cockpit, with this massive, massive piece of machinery behind you. | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| Pay the Russians? | ||
| Yeah, you can go over there and you can do almost anything now there. | ||
| Last year, I went over and spent a week at the cosmonaut training facility and actually spent a week training with the cosmonauts. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I went and spent... | ||
| By the way, one thing at a time. | ||
| To take the flight you took in the MiG, how much? | ||
| That was $11,000. | ||
| That's not that much? | ||
| No, not for the experience of being somewhere that, what, probably 1 100th of 1% of the human race has ever been to. | ||
| Oh, it almost looks like space. | ||
| It looks almost like space. | ||
| It's a pretty close approximation. | ||
| I mean, you were obviously above the majority of the atmosphere because you can see it layered below you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, we were above 99%. | ||
| Everything above is black. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And here's it. | ||
| I did that flight the day before the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's trip into space. | ||
| And I did it in Russia. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| My guest is Brian Walker. | ||
| And he's really going to do it. | ||
| You've got to see the photos. | ||
| All at artbell.com. | ||
| I am Art Bell. | ||
|
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Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks. | |
| A little jiving on a Saturday night. | ||
| Come walk me. | ||
| Running down the day away. | ||
| Music. | ||
| Get in with me. | ||
| Just smile for the people to meet. | ||
| You take yourself, you take the town. | ||
| Another love, another day for. | ||
| Another time, another one. | ||
| Another thing, get to take my home. | ||
| You take yourself, you make myself unloved. | ||
| I, I live among the creatures of the night. | ||
| I haven't got the will to try and fight against the moon tomorrow. | ||
| So I guess I'll just believe it, but tomorrow never counts. | ||
| I say it's night, I'm living in the forest of the dreams. | ||
| I know the night is not as what seems. | ||
| I must believe in something so I'll make myself believe it. | ||
| This night will never go. | ||
| Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. | ||
| All the night is my bow. | ||
| It's a light. | ||
| In the day, nothing but life. | ||
| Time is better. | ||
| Somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
| Ryan Walker is my guest. | ||
| And if you want to know why he wants to go, take a look at the MiG-25 picture that he took at 80,000 feet. | ||
| For $11,000, the Russians will let you take a ride. | ||
| And he did recently. | ||
| And he took a photo up there. | ||
| And I can understand why he wants to go. | ||
| You can see the blue of the atmosphere below and the black of space above. | ||
| That's where he was. | ||
| Just imagine where he's going. | ||
|
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*Skiss* | |
| You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2001. | ||
| All right, once again, back to the rocket guy, Brian Walker. | ||
| Brian, welcome back. | ||
| Thanks, how are you doing? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Listen, you're launching. | ||
| Did you say May 2nd? | ||
| No, May 2002. | ||
| I don't have an actual date yet. | ||
| My proposed launch would be a year from now, in May. | ||
| A year from now? | ||
| Yeah, May 30th would be my proposed date. | ||
| That's my birthday, which doesn't mean much, but you know, it does. | ||
| Well, yeah, a lot of ways, actually. | ||
|
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Quite a big birthday candle there. | |
| Listen, what time of day do you anticipate launching at? | ||
| Well, I have had quite a bit of interest from people wanting to carry this live on network TV. | ||
| I'm somebody who wants to come up there and sit in the bleach. | ||
| Oh, you better be here. | ||
| I plan on having an open launch and any meaning anyone who wants to show up is welcome to it, which based on the activity on my website, that could be several hundred thousand people show up. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| My website this month alone has been hit 900,000 times. | ||
| My mind. | ||
| So again, let me ask, what time of day? | ||
| Oh, what time of day? | ||
| Well, if it if it's going to be a live broadcast thing, it would have to probably be around oh, I would say between five and seven in the evening. | ||
| In in the evening. | ||
| because that way it can be shown live on the East Coast as well. | ||
| But that's, you know, I've kind of, I've had so many people coming at me with these things about this that it's diluted things a little bit. | ||
| Well, NASA always has launch delays. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying that would be the case with your rocket, but is that possible as you do the final checks? | ||
| Yeah, there's very few of those types of things that at the last minute would arise. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The worst of which would be a pressure leak that pressurizes the fuel tank because the way I feed the fuel to the engine is just basically a pressurized tank. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They've had some problem with that with the shuttle. | ||
| That has delayed shuttle launches. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I'll tell you what. | ||
| I would not have this thing standing up and ready to launch if there was any potential that there was going to be a pressure leak. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's a question, a pedestrian question I would like to ask. | ||
| While I understand that you will not escape the Earth's gravity, if you're up 30 or 35 miles, the g-force, if you weren't going anywhere but just sitting there at 35 miles, would be less, would it not, than when you're standing on Earth? | ||
| Well, from my understanding, like if you're, for instance, at sea level, and if you climb and stand on the top of Mount Everest, you're, you know, from sea level, you're 30,000 feet roughly. | ||
| And from what I understand, your weight on Mount Everest would actually be very fractional less than what it was at sea level. | ||
| What about at 35 miles? | ||
| Well, even at 35 miles, we're talking a fractional weight changes because gravity exists a long ways away from Earth. | ||
| It just diminishes the farther you get away from. | ||
| Well then that is not going to extend your moment of ecstasy. | ||
| No, I'm not going to you know for instance on the space shuttle the reason people are floating around weightless is because the centrifugal force of the shuttle as it zooms around the Earth is just exactly enough to counteract the pull of gravity. | ||
| And they're floating because the centrifugal forces are an absolute opposite of what the pull of gravity is. | ||
| If the space shuttle could stop and magically be suspended, like if God just held it there with his hand and he couldn't move, everybody on board would assume weight that would be a little less than the Earth's surface, but not a whole lot. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Because, yeah, the gravity remains... | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| I've really never done that much of a study. | ||
| But think about it for a second. | ||
| The gravity of the Earth is strong enough to keep the Moon a quarter million miles away in its orbit. | ||
| Very good point, yes. | ||
| So, and you know, and then you look at the Sun, and that's strong enough gravity to keep us in its orbit 90 million miles away. | ||
| So the point is you can never really be stationary in space, because if you were stopped in space, you would soon be attracted to the nearest gravitational body, which would start attracting you towards it. | ||
| So you'd be re-entering real quick. | ||
| Yes, very quick. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go back. | ||
| We kind of skipped ahead in your photographs a little bit. | ||
| I see then what is this thing that looks like it's got a propeller on it on one side, and then it's got, it looks like part of your, is your capsule on the other end? | ||
| No, that is my centrifuge. | ||
| Your centrifuge. | ||
| And when I was in Russia, I went in their centrifuge and got up to six G's. | ||
| I wanted to go to like eight. | ||
| I wanted to go until I blacked out, but they wouldn't take me past six. | ||
| But I liked it so much that I thought, well, you know, I really need to build one of my own. | ||
| would you want to go into your blackout blocking out is not a really well i think that not In other words, I would have liked to take it to the edge of where I felt I was at the same time. | ||
| You're going to lose it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I don't mean that quite in those. | ||
| Okay, I've got you. | ||
| So then what have we here? | ||
| What I've got here is when I came back from Russia, I thought, well, that was so neat, I have to have my own. | ||
| And so the one I'm building here, let's see, the picture shows it sitting on a post. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The blue capsule at one end is where I sit. | ||
| I got that. | ||
| And the propeller on the other end is the new ultralight. | ||
| That's a 22-horsepower ultralight engine. | ||
| And when that runs causes this thing to spin around that center point. | ||
| And it begins to spin quite rapidly, I take it. | ||
| 70 miles an hour. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And at 70 miles an hour, that'll put six Gs at the seat. | ||
| And actually, this thing is really nicely balanced. | ||
| When you hang it from the center point, with my weight on board, it's perfectly balanced. | ||
| Of course, if you change it by two pounds, it begins to tip. | ||
| But what I want to do is the launch of the rocket will be vertically accelerating for 90 seconds, and I'll experience a variety of G-loadings. | ||
| So I'm going to simulate in that little capsule of the centrifuge the same G-forces over the same period of time that I'm going to encounter in the rocket. | ||
| Logical, sure. | ||
| So yeah, I know what I have to expect, and the only things that I'll do inside the test centrifuge would be, can I activate the abort lever? | ||
| Can I activate this? | ||
| Can I do that? | ||
| So you can actually test yourself. | ||
| I want to be able to test myself and know that when I'm in that thing and it's going up and something happens that, okay, all the safety backup features in the world are great, but unless the number one backup safety feature, which is my mind, unless that's in tune, then | ||
| In other words, if the rocket began to leave vertical and take off for some reason horizontally and then even begin to plunge toward Earth, would you necessarily be aware of that? | ||
| And if so, how? | ||
| Well, I'd be aware of it from a number of different things. | ||
| The onboard gyroscope, which actually in the upper stages of the flight, the gyroscope is keeping the capsule pointed straight by activating a series of little rocket motors In the nose of the capsule. | ||
| That would be an indicator. | ||
| Secondly, the ground control, which I'll be completely in touch with the ground crew the whole time, they would be able to say, hey, there's a problem. | ||
| And of course, in the first six to ten seconds when I'm relatively close to the ground. | ||
| No control. | ||
| Well, any problem at all that is a big one is shut down the engine and separate the capsule immediately. | ||
| And the way the capsule separates is there's basically it's not much different than an automotive airbag in a little cylinder area between the fuel tank and the capsule. | ||
| And when that fires, it instantaneously pops the capsule off of the fuel tank. | ||
| And at the same time, the six little rocket motors on the bottom of the capsule fire to separate me. | ||
| And those would burn for about five seconds. | ||
| What is your minimum altitude for a safe ejection, do you think? | ||
| Well, if this was sitting on the ground and I fired the separation motors in the capsule, that alone would be enough to push me far enough away and deploy the parachute to descend from a ground position. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It has to be that way because you never know. | ||
| This thing might develop a problem that requires me to leave before I even launch. | ||
| Now, I have not yet been able to come up with the scenario in which that would occur, but what I've tried to do here is think of every single possible thing that might go wrong and then expand on those as many times as I can and then start thinking of the unthinkable. | ||
| All right, now here is a picture of you with the overall rocket assembly, and you appear to be in a spacesuit. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Those are the new forms. | ||
| The capsule, as you can see, is a bit different. | ||
| The windows profile has changed. | ||
| Very much, yes. | ||
| Okay, the only area that I look out of is the flat area, and that's a half-inch thick laminate of polycarbonate. | ||
| And then the open area on top, there's a little window sill, and I have a molded polycarbonate panel that fits over that so it doesn't disrupt the airflow of the air over the capsule. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then up near the front, you'll see there's a series of little ridges around the diameter of the capsule. | ||
| I see that, yes. | ||
| There's eight of those, and those are behind each one of those is a hole, and that's where the eight rocket motors go. | ||
| And then, of course, the end of this capsule is just part of the form. | ||
| There's actually a very nice pointed nose cone, and up in the nose section is where the primary recovery gear is. | ||
| And then also in the back of the capsule, there's a secondary recovery gear. | ||
| In case the first, what happens when I get up to the absolute highest point of the flight, I'm going to actually come to a dead stop and then immediately begin to fall. | ||
| And at that altitude, there's no air. | ||
| So deploying a parachute at that altitude doesn't do any good, and it actually can produce a lot of dangerous, you know, the parachute could come out, and since there's no air, as I'm tumbling, it's a little bit more. | ||
| You could tumble right into it. | ||
| Yeah, I could tumble into it. | ||
| It could get snagged up. | ||
| So what happens, the first thing that occurs when I reach apogee is the nose cone pops off and an inflatable bag, it's kind of a thing that once was termed a balloon, which was a cross between a balloon and a parachute. | ||
| It's just a reinforced nylon bag that inflates out the nose. | ||
| And what it does is it allows me, as I begin to descend, I will begin picking up the effect of airflow over the capsule. | ||
| So the wobble and shakiness and the tumbling action will stop after a few moments. | ||
| And because I've extended this inflated bag out the nose of the capsule, it'll just allow the thing to fall stable. | ||
| That's my first concern is I want the thing to fall stable. | ||
| I don't care how fast it goes. | ||
| I don't care what it's going to do. | ||
| just don't want the thing to tumble In other words, where do you get enough air to be able to deploy a parachute from 30,000? | ||
| I will deploy the first parachute at around, probably be around 60,000 feet is when that airbag releases, it automatically pulls out the first drag chute. | ||
| And that stays open until I reach down to an altitude of about 30,000 feet. | ||
| And then that pulls out the actual pilot chute, which still has me suspended from the nose, falling tail first. | ||
| And then as I reach the altitude, depending on how far off the target I am, that will determine how high I open. | ||
| If I've hit some turbulent air or some winds and I've drifted a considerable distance off target, then I would probably open at a higher level and I would have a greater glide ratio and a greater distance that I could cover. | ||
| But once I'm ready to deploy the landing parachute, the bridle, which is the suspension line from the pilot chute, that's connected to the nose of the capsule. | ||
| That is actually runs along the upper top surface of the capsule to the back end. | ||
| It's held in place with little stays because what I wanted to do is I want it to be able to pull the landing parachute straight out of the back. | ||
| So I go from a tail first to a nose first configuration. | ||
| That'll be an interesting switchover for you. | ||
| It's a series of little stays that allow, over a period of about three seconds, the capsule goes from pointing one direction to pointing the other direction. | ||
| Then that allows a nice, very, very clean deployment of the main parachute, which is quite large in its pack. | ||
| And it is basically about a 600 square foot ram-air wing like a skydiver uses. | ||
| From the moment you launch until the moment you touch down, what roughly would you calculate would be the total flight time? | ||
| It should be about 15 minutes. | ||
| 15 minutes? | ||
| And most of that will be mostly be underneath the parachute. | ||
| I mean, the single, if you look at the different phases, like the power phase, the coast phase, the descent phase, the longest one particular phase will probably be the time underneath the parachute. | ||
| Depending on how high I open. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And anyway, that suit I'm wearing actually, that's a Russian microclimate suit, And when I went over and flew the MiG, they first put me in a full-body anti-G suit, and then they put this suit over it, and then I put on the helmet. | ||
| The helmet I'm wearing in that picture is an actual MiG-25 helmet that I bought from a street vendor in St. Petersburg. | ||
| Holy crap. | ||
| It's functional. | ||
| It's got a locking collar. | ||
| It's got a radio headset inside. | ||
| The face mask can open and close. | ||
| I've already run it up and it maintains air pressure. | ||
| I got it for $100. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| I bought a chess set for about St. Mana in St. Petersburg. | ||
| Beautiful town, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, it is. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| And the people were wonderful. | ||
| And I had an opportunity to do a TV show while I was over there. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And, well, a local TV station wanted to do a story on what I was doing. | ||
| And, you know, one of the really neat benefits I've had from going public with this, not only from the support I've gotten from so many people, but especially when I'm in Russia, the Russians are trying so hard to adopt concepts of democracy and freedom and entrepreneurship and all this stuff that they're very encouraged to see what I'm doing and that because I come from a country that values the individual and liberty and all that, | ||
| the stuff that we oftentimes take for granted, they see that I'm approaching such a big dream and they're very encouraged by it. | ||
| I tell you, you were not really surprised to see Mr. Tito purchase his way onto the International Space Station with the Russians for 20 mil? | ||
| Well, you know, it's actually funny. | ||
| When I was in Moscow last June at the Cosmo Training Facility, I had a chance to meet him. | ||
| Because this was in June of last year, he was still trying to go to Mir before they brought Mir down. | ||
| And he was there at the same time I was, and I actually was there at his press conference and then had a chance to chat with him afterwards. | ||
| And the really ironic thing is that right now there's a woman on the International Space Station that I went to high school with, Susan Helms. | ||
| And she actually graduated the year after me. | ||
| So at one point in time last, a couple weeks ago, I actually knew two people that were orbiting the planet at the same time. | ||
| What do the Russians generally think of your plan? | ||
| And did you get a chance to tell Mr. Tito about your plan? | ||
| Oh, briefly, I had a chance to chat with him when I was there. | ||
| And of course, this past year for him, I'm sure, he's had so much going on trying to get approval. | ||
| And he's made a bunch of flights there. | ||
| But I had a chance to talk to him a little bit about it. | ||
| And he thought it was pretty neat, but didn't get the chance to go into it in depth. | ||
| As far as the Russians, when I was there last year, they were pretty much echoing the same kind of attitude that the individual Russian people I met as far as, you know, here I was trying to mount my own little one-man space program, and it was the result of the fact that I come from a country that allows me to do such a thing. | ||
| Well, now that's a separate subject about this country allowing you to do it. | ||
| Well, let me say it at least allows me to attempt to do it. | ||
| Or to begin building the stuff to do it. | ||
| At least I've had the freedom here to coordinate my life the way I want it to be and to be able to proceed in this. | ||
| Now, we're going to break here, but when we come back, I want to talk about the FAA a little bit because I understand. | ||
| The FAA? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| You know the FAA. | ||
|
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Future Astronauts of America. | |
| Yeah, Future Astronauts of America. | ||
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
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Somewhere in Time with Art Bell. | |
| continues courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I travel the world and the seven seas. | ||
| Everybody is looking for something. | ||
| Some of them want to use you. | ||
| Some of them want to get used by you. | ||
| Some of them want to abuse you. | ||
| Some of them want to be abused. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Sweet dreams are made of these. | ||
| Who else? | ||
| Oh, please, please tell me what's in love. | ||
| I know it sounds absurd. | ||
| Please tell me who I am. | ||
| I said, now what would you say? | ||
| I'll be calling you a radical, a liberal, or a fanatical criminal. | ||
| So won't you sign up your name? | ||
| We'd like to be your acceptable, respectable, or presentable, or vegetable. | ||
| Oh, take, take, take it, yeah! | ||
| But at night when all the wolves sleep, the questions run so deep, and the world's gone. | ||
| But at night when all the world's asleep The questions run so deep Premier Network presents Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| Well, I was just back talking to my wife, and she said, I don't know. | ||
| What is it about this guy? | ||
|
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Things he's going to launch himself up there and then he's just going to float back down to Earth. | |
| He's crazy. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But, you know, what do women know, right? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think he can do it. | ||
| I think that he's got the knowledge, The expertise, the money, the capability, and the rocket. | ||
| And I think he can do it. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| He's Brian Walker, they call him the rocket guy, and for good reason. | ||
| If you want a visual, I don't know, demonstration of what he's going to use to get virtually 35 miles up. | ||
| Where there's no air. | ||
| Nothing but the curvature of the earth and the black of space. | ||
| And then come back to her if you want to know how he's going to do it. | ||
| It's we've got every photograph to show you on the website artbell.com. | ||
| Program tonight's guest info. | ||
| click on it and there are two pages of pictures of what he's built so far and what ryan thinks is going to take him into space You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
|
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Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2001. | |
| Well, all right. | ||
| There apparently is some indication, according to the New York Post article, that the FAA may have some problems with what Brian plans to do there in Bend, Oregon. | ||
| Actually, you're not that far north of me, so I will load my RV and come up and see it, that is, if it occurs in Bend. | ||
| Now, what has the FAA told you, and did they approach you, or did you approach them with your plans, or what? | ||
| Well, actually, it's kind of funny because I've never spoken to them, and they've never spoken to me. | ||
| I think in some of the articles that have been written, people have gone and talked to people at the FAA and said, hey, a guy wants to launch a rocket, what's the deal? | ||
| And that's when they come back and say, well, he's going to have to do this, this, and this. | ||
| Well, the reason I say that is even amateur rocket enthusiasts have got to go and get licenses and stuff like that. | ||
| Basically, if you want to go into the airspace between 18,000 and 60,000 feet, you either need to have an aircraft with instrument flight rules, a flight plan, and a transponder, or you need a waiver. | ||
| Now, when members of the High-Powered Model Rocket Club, when they want to launch rockets to 50,000, 60,000 feet or whatever, they will apply to the FAA for a waiver. | ||
| And if it's determined that their launch location and altitude and time and when they want to launch is not going to interfere with commercial air traffic, they're issued a waiver. | ||
| Now, I am all in favor of that, because the last thing I want to do on a cross-country flight is have some idiot in a home-built rocket punch through the cabin of my cruising jetliner and cause me to spill my drink. | ||
| So I'm in total faith. | ||
| I have no problems. | ||
| And the place where I plan to launch from is a very remote area where there's no, I mean, there's a population density of about one person every 500 square miles. | ||
| But still, don't you have to have a license? | ||
| Well, I will apply for a waiver and say, hey, here's where I want to launch. | ||
| This is where I want to go. | ||
| And if the FAA determines that my flight will not cause any threat and danger to existing air traffic, then they're compelled to issue me a waiver. | ||
| The FAA's concern is not for my general health and well-being. | ||
| It's for the safety of the general public. | ||
| That's what they're there for. | ||
| And more power to them for that. | ||
| But if it comes down to someone saying, well, no, we're not going to let you go, then they're basically telling me I'm a prisoner on the planet. | ||
| And if I want to go off-world, I can't even do that. | ||
| Let me put it in short verse. | ||
| I am not going to let the possibility of some bureaucracy prevent me when there's so many hurdles that I have to overcome now. | ||
| So in due course, when I get closer to that launch date, I will begin the process of getting a waiver. | ||
| But there's so many things I have to do to make sure this project comes out right. | ||
| That's kind of like the last thing on my mind. | ||
| Well, you could also, I suppose, just do what the Spider-Man did. | ||
| He was climbing a building earlier today on CNN. | ||
| And he goes, whether they like it or not, and he gets arrested later, so big deal. | ||
| Well, actually, I really seriously doubt I would do that. | ||
| I would basically exhaust every legal method of getting permission. | ||
| And if it looked like it was just going to be too big of a problem, I have no doubt that the Mexican government would be much, much more pleased to have me come down and launch there. | ||
| Yeah, they wouldn't care. | ||
| You'd just pay a certain amount of money to a certain group of people and you'd launch. | ||
| Yeah, or I'd tow it offshore on a barge. | ||
| So there's a lot of other options. | ||
| I do want to launch from my home soil. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| That's the way to do it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, first of all, you really live in the right place anyway. | ||
| Yeah, the place that I want to launch from is a very, very remote section of the southeast corner of Oregon. | ||
| On the other hand, Bend, Oregon is a small place. | ||
| Well, remember, I'm building it. | ||
| I'm not launching it. | ||
| No, I am just saying what I'm asking about is how the people of Bend, Oregon take all this. | ||
| There have been a few stories that have run locally, and most people are pretty excited about it. | ||
| In general, I've had my website's been hit about 6 million times since June, and I've had thousands and thousands of emails, and 99% of them are all extremely positive and uplifting, and just wonderful to read people. | ||
| Some people write very poetic things that, you know, the challenge that I put forth before me and the way that I'm trying to approach a childhood dream is enough to cause them to look at their own dreams and things. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, remember, folks, the shuttle you watch in this long, laborous launch, in the case of Brian, it says he'll be gone out of sight in 15 seconds. | ||
| Is that really true? | ||
| Yeah, once it launches, it's going to accelerate quickly, and within about 15, probably 15 to 20 seconds, it'll be literally out of sight. | ||
| Oh, you're going to be really moving. | ||
| Well, it has 90 seconds to reach its top speed, because once that fuel kicks out, from there, it's a coast. | ||
| It's just coasting. | ||
| Are you married? | ||
| No. | ||
| You're not married. | ||
| That's a good thing, because women not to understand this. | ||
| Hey, I've been looking for like 44 years for someone to understand it. | ||
| it's a guy kind of thing and i i know i'll get a lot nasty emails about that but it really is i mean my my own wife she thinks you're loony is yeah Ramona said that, I'm crushed. | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, she was smiling when she said it, but she really somehow she just doesn't understand this. | ||
| I think it's more of a guy thing. | ||
| Well, I think that's it. | ||
| I think, and it's also the mothering thing of most women have this, you know, inside of them is probably, I don't know, some Freudian thing I can't think of right now. | ||
| You say here that a pickup truck will be waiting to drive you to a group of bleachers where fans and 12 Hooters bar girls will pour champagne. | ||
| That's the fantasy side of this. | ||
| I'm hoping that by the time I'm ready to launch, I'll have a 12 Hooters girl. | ||
| Because, you know, look at it, I've got to have cheerleaders, right? | ||
| Yeah, oh, yeah. | ||
| And I've got to have the triumphal champagne pour. | ||
| There's a bunch of XFL cheerleaders looking for some work anyway. | ||
| you know there's gotta be a Because the capsule comes down underneath the parachute at a very slow and very stable rate of descent and forward speed. | ||
| And I won't do anything other than keep it into the wind. | ||
| And hopefully the people driving the truck that's pulling this big, huge, long flatbed would be able to center it underneath my parachute. | ||
| Well, I recommend the Las Vegas cheerleaders, the XFL cheerleaders now out of work. | ||
| They had particularly well-formed capsules. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Well, hey, that always helps. | ||
| So that's a great way to end this, and hopefully it will end that way. | ||
| Is there any way for you to calculate through the entire thing, from the launch to the recovery, what the odds are of something going wrong? | ||
| Well, yeah, as more test data becomes available, because I don't have any test data right now because I haven't been able to test any of these components. | ||
| Later this summer, I will plan on dropping the capsule from a high altitude from around 20,000 feet high from like a C-123. | ||
| Unmanned. | ||
| Unmanned, and to test the parachute deployment system and all those types of things and to the stability. | ||
| And I'm going to step up those kind of tests during the fall. | ||
| A lot of people say, Brian, why not do a complete unmanned flight before you do a manned flight? | ||
| Because the only part that I have to do, I need to be able to launch the rocket and know that I can get it up to 1,000 to 1,500 feet without there being a major problem. | ||
| Anything after that, and this is one of the things that I've always, oh, I guess I understand it, but sometimes I don't understand it, that people seem to freak out when you talk about going higher and higher. | ||
| And to me, I look at the higher I go, the greater my safety margin becomes. | ||
| Once I get up there, okay, true, there's no air up there. | ||
| Well, if you go two inches underwater, there's no air down there either. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you have to bring it with you. | ||
| It's cold outside. | ||
| Well, that's great. | ||
| It's cold and there's no air. | ||
| What will the temperature be, by the way? | ||
| I don't know exactly what it is at the altitude I'm going, but it gets down to, what, I don't know, 200 degrees below zero in space or something. | ||
| 200 below zero. | ||
| Yeah, it's very cold. | ||
| Below zero. | ||
| Do you know astronaut spacesuits are so well insulated that they don't have heating, they just have cooling? | ||
| Really? | ||
| They're little tubes. | ||
| Now, this may have changed from the earlier days, but the point is they were so well insulated they kept all the body heat in. | ||
| And the little undergarment they wore had cooling tubes all through it that they ran cold water through to keep the body temperature. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because vacuum is not the best conductor for heat. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But there again, my flight is so fast, so short. | ||
| It goes up, it comes down. | ||
| The air supply I bring on board is four times the amount that you're going to need. | ||
| The garments I'll be wearing would protect me even if I was outside the capsule for this long a period of time as I might have to fall. | ||
| The capsule itself will be pressurized, right? | ||
| The capsule is pressurized to five pounds per square inch. | ||
| And in case of a cabin pressure loss, that's why I have the suit on. | ||
| That's basically one extra backup. | ||
| I do not expect the cabin to lose pressure, but that's one of the things you have to prepare for because the difference between living and dying at that point is whether you're prepared for cabin loss. | ||
| There won't be any little oxygen mask falling down for you. | ||
| No, there won't be any little oxygen mask coming down and having to worry about putting on a child first. | ||
| So then the ways of calculating the possible risk overall to you, there really is no exact way, particularly without having a full test flight of this. | ||
| No, I think to try and calculate a risk factor or a number would be really difficult. | ||
| Once the components individually have been completed and finished and I've been able to weigh them correctly and being able to know about the dynamics of the capsule and freefall, it'll be a lot easier at that point to do some computer modeling based on the amount of weight of takeoff, the amount of thrust to take off, the amount of extra momentum gained from the boosted launch. | ||
| These things will all, you know, I'll be able to crunch numbers better and come up with some more accurate numbers in those. | ||
| All right, I'm looking at another photograph now. | ||
| This one shows part of the capsule, and it shows, to me, what looked like gigantic CO2 cartridges. | ||
| Okay, those are the eight, there's eight 55-pound thrust motors in the nose of the capsule. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's what those little bumps, if you see in the background, you can see the nose of the capsule, you can see those little bumps. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Those motors mount very similar to the way they're mounted there. | ||
| That's just a little holder that they're on is just... | ||
| to show you, exactly. | ||
| They would be mounted in there, and each one has a little servo connected to a valve, and that runs to a very simple little gyroscopic device with a small computer. | ||
| And whenever the capsule is not pointed 90 degrees straight up, the corresponding rocket motor just gives a little spit of power to keep that nose pointed straight. | ||
| So this is not the kind of guidance control system that would guide me to a specific destination. | ||
| It is a guidance control system that only does one thing. | ||
| It keeps me pointed straight. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| All right, the next one down almost looks like a giant ball of twine. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Okay, that is the main fuel tank on the rocket that I actually will be in is going to be about 42 inches in diameter. | ||
| This is a test tank that I'm building for doing the initial test, which will be launched unmanned, you know, to much lower altitude. | ||
| 5,000, 6,000 feet is all I really want to do with this in an unmanned version. | ||
| So the tank, I went to a place that builds lightweight composite pressure vessels, and of course they wanted NASA-type budget to build my tanks. | ||
| So I've been experimenting on building my own tank, and I think if you scroll down one picture below that, are you on the second page? | ||
| I am, yes. | ||
| I'm still on the... | ||
| My computer did something bad during the break and I had to reboot it. | ||
| The blue screen of... | ||
| A sewer pipe? | ||
| Just a PVC sewer pipe. | ||
| They're very nice. | ||
| They're the right diameter. | ||
| They're perfectly straight. | ||
| And by wrapping that with fiberglass, I made a sleeve that then slid off the sewer pipe, and I could just fiberglass hemispheres on either end. | ||
| Now, right now, what you're talking about is the tank has to be wrapped with carbon fiber and Kevlar, and that allows it to withstand pressure. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Because in order to feed the fuel into the chamber of the motor, it needs to come in there at a constant 300 pounds of air pressure. | ||
| And that is looking, that picture you're referring to, has got the motor and the pulleys that rotate the tank. | ||
| So then you're wrapping this for additional strength. | ||
| Right, so it can withstand the pressure. | ||
| If you drop down two more pictures, you can see the lengthwise fuel tank on the stand. | ||
| I sure do. | ||
| And then right below it, you can see it with the carbon fiber and Kevlar wrapped around it. | ||
| And in the background, that's the sewer pipe I use as a mandrel. | ||
| How much additional strength is added by wrapping it then? | ||
| Oh, a lot. | ||
| I mean, depending on what density of the material you use. | ||
| So there's enough pressure in there, so without that, it would either blow up or just expand? | ||
| Well, it would rupture. | ||
| Rupture. | ||
| That tank right now, as it stands, would probably burst at around, I don't know, maybe 700 or 800 psi, which is a lot more than I'll be doing. | ||
| And you'll have no more than about 300? | ||
| No, probably have a tank pressurized at about 400 psi. | ||
| 400. | ||
| And then there'll be a regulator because there will be eight small carbon fiber high-pressure air tanks that supply the pressure to this tank to keep the fuel flowing. | ||
| So this tank alone just has to be pressurized to the limit that is necessary to feed the fuel into the chamber. | ||
| If you do this successfully, how do you think NASA will handle it? | ||
| Oh, you know, it's funny because listening to some of your guests the past couple, oh, the past week or so, and listening to some of their sentiments about NASA. | ||
| You know, I grew up at a time when I thought NASA was the most wonderful, incredible thing in the world. | ||
| Oh, me too. | ||
| And after we left the moon for the last time, it seems to me that NASA, from that point on, just lost its vision. | ||
| And the idea of that 2001, A Space Odyssey, that that movie, it kind of painted this future where we were going to be spending our time in space stations and going to the moon. | ||
| And, you know, to say we're no closer now than we were then is an understatement. | ||
| I think we're further away. | ||
| Because at least back then we were going to the moon. | ||
| And I think the idea of going to Mars is great, but personally, I think we should have people living and existing on the moon. | ||
| Oh, no disagreement for me. | ||
| But again, the question really is, how do you think NASA will handle the I don't know? | ||
| It's kind of a sure embarrassment for them. | ||
| Well, if I went up and knocked on the door of the International Space Station with a bottle of vodka and caviar and said, hey, let me in, I can understand them really, really having a cow at that point. | ||
| But going up 35 miles and coming back down, you know, there'll probably be very little that they will actually say. | ||
| Well, I mean, they did the rough equivalent of that, and what did it cost them? | ||
| Well, of course, what it cost them, it cost them because no one had ever done it before, and they were making the whole thing up. | ||
| They were inventing it all. | ||
| I've had a very nice little gift to me in the form of being able to review the past 50 years of the space program and learning from their mistakes. | ||
| So I'm not really inventing anything here. | ||
| I'm borrowing technologies that have already been proven. | ||
| As a matter of fact, if you've ever seen the rocket belt fly, the guy you know at the Olympics and TV commercials and Lost in Space. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| That rocket belt is the same, that uses the same fuel and the same engine that I'm using. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's what I would like to do, Brian. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There are people out there after seeing all of this and hearing you that are dying, aching to ask questions. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So are you up for that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Then when we get back, that's exactly what we're going to do. | ||
| We're going to go to the phones with Brian Walker. | ||
| If you have questions, and I bet you do, now would be the time. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
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This is Coast to Coast A.M. You are listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| Her hands are never cold. | ||
| She's got better days on. | ||
| She turned her music on. | ||
| You won't have to think twice. | ||
| She's pure as New York snow. | ||
| You can dance, you can dance. | ||
| Having the time of your life. | ||
| Ooh, see that girl. | ||
| Watch that sea. | ||
| Dig it, she's dancing queen. | ||
| Friday night and the night's on low. | ||
| Looking out for a place to go. | ||
| Where they play the white music. | ||
| Getting in the swing. | ||
| You've come to look for a king. | ||
| Anybody can be there! | ||
| You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| We're about to go to phones with Brian Walker, and I want to stress the international number again. | ||
| Wherever you are in the world, you can get to us, and it's our nickel. | ||
| We'll pay for the call. | ||
| You can go to my website and check out the international codes and try it that way. | ||
| Or you can call the AT ⁇ T operator and have her connect you from Europe or Asia or wherever you may be. | ||
| We'd love to have you join us this night, this afternoon, this morning, whatever it is, wherever you are. | ||
| The international number, again, is 800-893-0903, anywhere outside the U.S. and Canada. | ||
| And I promise I'll try and get to it as quick as I can. | ||
| That's 800-893-0903. | ||
| your questions for brian walker a guy who's going to actually launch himself into space shortly in a moment Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
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Music. | |
| All right, once again, Brian Walker, the man who is going to, from near Bend, Oregon, not in Bend, Oregon, but near Bend, Oregon, launch himself to 30 to 35 miles up and then hopefully return safely to the ground. | ||
| Brian, are you ready for questions? | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| I know not what is about to happen, so prepare yourself. | ||
| It's like launching, I guess. | ||
| My feet braced up against the wall and a cold one in my hand. | ||
|
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Yeah, good. | |
| All right. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
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Hi, how are you doing? | |
| Okay, sir. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
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Youngston, Ohio. | |
| Youngstown, Ohio. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
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Yes, I have a question for Brian. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
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First, I'd like to say I love your show. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
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Has NASA given you any kind of like special restrictions about where you can go in the air or where you can land on the ground? | |
| No, NASA does not. | ||
| You know, I think a lot of people have kind of put upon NASA a lot more authority and figure than they really have. | ||
| NASA's a government agency that basically conducts rocket flights from Earth to space. | ||
| Other than that, there's no real jurisdictional authority that they have outside the scope of what they're doing. | ||
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Has the U.S. government given you kind of restrictions? | |
| No, I have not had anyone from government, with the exception of Bureau of Land Management, has raised some issues about where I want to launch and the impact it might have on having a quarter million people show up at such a remote spot. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| And there's some good points there. | ||
| It could turn into a back East 30 years ago. | ||
| A Woodstock. | ||
| Yeah, another sort of a Western Woodstock. | ||
| Yeah, I doubt it would be. | ||
| I'm not going to have the headliners, although I'd love to get the Moody Blues to come play for my after-launch party. | ||
| That could probably be done. | ||
| I'd love that. | ||
| What would you have them play? | ||
| I'd have them play Ride My Seesaw at launch. | ||
| Tuesday afternoon at the interlude at the top of the flight. | ||
| And then probably nice and white satin after I've landed. | ||
| You like a lot of my bumper music, don't you? | ||
| Yeah, I do, actually. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wow, Cardline, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
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Yes, good evening. | |
| Good evening to you. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
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I'm in Alberta, Canada. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
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My question is about your landing, Brian. | |
| Yes, you said you wanted to land on the back of a moving flat dead truck. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Well, I have two scenarios. | ||
| Number one is the optimum. | ||
| Number two is what really happens. | ||
| And the capsule will be coming down horizontally, flying forward as opposed to its nose-up attitude of launch and tail-first descent. | ||
| When the parafoil, when the ram air wing opens up, I will be gliding underneath that. | ||
| And I would like to be able to put it on the back of a truck that is positioned underneath me and maintaining the same airspeed and same direction as me. | ||
| Fortunately, it is not a mission, it's not one of the critical aspects of the mission. | ||
| If I don't hit it, I don't hit it. | ||
| It's not going to affect my landing precisely. | ||
|
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What about the impact? | |
| Well, the impact is going to be similar to a skydiver landing. | ||
|
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Yeah, I did that already, so I knew what that is. | |
| It's like jumping off a truck at 8 miles an hour or something. | ||
| Right, well, I recently took up skydiving because that's part of my training for this. | ||
| And I've managed to so far have all except one of a stand-up landing. | ||
| The capsule itself does not have landing gear per se, but just before I land, there's a big inflatable bag that comes out from beneath the capsule to absorb the impact of the landing. | ||
|
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Oh, I didn't hear you say that earlier. | |
| Well, I didn't go into it. | ||
| It's impossible for me to go into all the details. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| No, there's a little panel that pops away from the bottom of the capsule. | ||
| The bottom that is when it's in the landing configuration. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, I see. | |
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| There's a bag that inflates with air and acts as a giant cushion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| And the parasail, will you be able to control that? | ||
| Yes, the ram air wing is basically, you know, when you're skydiving or paragliding, you've got two control lines that you control with your arms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| those will be connected to small d_c_ motors that can reel in those lines and reel them back out uh... | ||
| very very quickly uh... | ||
| i think the control lines are checkered black and white so as they travel through an optical sensor there's a little uh... | ||
| led display inside the cockpit which tells me if i have pulled in all the way over a little back out all the way i can Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, one last question. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In your scenario of going, say, putting it on a barge and going to the ocean, then you would do an ocean landing, a water landing? | |
| Well, yes, I'd have to do a splashdown at that point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's not in the carts for just like a land launch? | |
| It's not in the carts to do a water landing launching. | ||
| No, I don't want to do a water landing. | ||
| Yeah, and if you have to do a water landing, that means you have drifted way too far. | ||
| I've drifted a long ways away. | ||
| But that kind of thing at that altitude. | ||
| Oh, no, if you figure 35 miles up, you figure even in the fiercest of winds, and you figure that, remember, this is not going to drift. | ||
| I'm not floating up there. | ||
| When I run out of fuel, I still weigh a lot. | ||
| And the parachutes that would be opened up for my landing sequence, I will be way, way, way, way closer to the ground. | ||
| So I could not go too far. | ||
| I've got you. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on there with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art Bell. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Brian. | |
| It's Joe from Boston. | ||
| Hi, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How you doing? | |
| Good, how are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I wanted to talk a little bit, and if I could make a comment, also ask about the spacesuit, because now they're putting heaters in the gloves, and they may or may not have them in the rest of the station. | ||
| Yeah, but they're doing space walks up there, and they're out 200-blower or whatever for a long time. | ||
| He's going to be there, as he explained, a very short time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, is he still going to have pumps and oxygen in case he needs it? | |
| Well, the suit itself will have, there's two systems that control. | ||
| One system controls the capsule itself as far as providing pressure and air. | ||
| Then the second system provides my suit with the same. | ||
| That comes on if there's a cabin pressure loss. | ||
| The reason they put the heaters mostly in the fingertips and the feet is because the circulation and the extremities like that is so poor that those portions can get very cold when you consider you got a couple layers of fabric separating you from the vacuum of space. | ||
| But my particular needs will be much, much less because at the greatest length of time that I would have that kind of exposure would never be more than half the total duration of the flight. | ||
| What are you going to do for communications to the ground, Brian? | ||
| I'm going to have basic telemetry set up because since it is a line-of-sight thing, it should be very easy to maintain really good radio contact with the ground. | ||
| They will be able to monitor the I mean what sort of frequencies and license do you use for that? | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| Again, these are some of the details that I myself know nothing about, but I've had so many people offer their services over the past nine or ten months. | ||
| I've had people that do telemetry and do remote camera. | ||
| And so when it gets closer to that time, then that's when I'll start focusing on that. | ||
| But I know it's possible. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about line-of-sight radio communication for 35 miles. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| That's easy to do. | ||
| What exact frequency? | ||
| I don't have a clear. | ||
| Will there be a camera focused on you in the capsule? | ||
| We can see your little face going. | ||
| Yes, but I have complete power as to which images I transmit to the ground. | ||
| I might not have the one on my face turned on a whole lot, depending on how there will be one camera in the cocktail looking at me, then there'll be one on my helmet, so whatever I'm looking at, I'm seeing. | ||
| And there'll be one in the nose looking down, and one in the fuel tank looking up. | ||
| Will you actually transmit video to ground? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You will. | ||
| I plan on having a big tent, a VIP tent. | ||
| Obviously, if I have 50,000 or 100,000 people show up, I can't accommodate everyone in those kind of conditions. | ||
| But I would like to have a large Sony projection type system going on. | ||
| And once I'm out of sight, people from inside the tent would be able to continue to watch. | ||
| It's really important to me that I get as much good video and pictures from this event as I can. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because I want to be able to, you know, right now when I go back and watch the videos I took in the MIG jet, it's like, you know, it's great to be able to watch what you've done. | ||
| If you are successful on your first try, will you try again? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, I have a very strong desire to be part of the private space movement. | ||
| A lot of people ask me, are you going for the XPRIZE? | ||
| And it's like, well, no, I would not attempt to go for an XPRIZE doing it the way I'm doing it. | ||
| Having to take two passengers, having to go 62 miles and be able to return to space in a two-week period of time. | ||
| That's a little bit more of an undertaking than I would attempt to do what I'm doing. | ||
| But I've been to, in fact, I was at the Conference on Space Tourism back in D.C. in 99 and actually met Robert Bigelow there. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And, you know, I stay very close to what he's doing and the idea of the space hotel. | ||
| He's a real serious guy, and he's got the means. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| But I would like to have my little portion of that, even if it's only raising the consciousness level of people that we're never going to see people getting the opportunity to go into space unless private enterprise picks it up. | ||
| Because the government's just not going to do it. | ||
| Well, you're going to shock a lot of people if you do it. | ||
| I mean, it's going to be shock. | ||
| Actually, you're going to shock nations if you do it. | ||
| Well, you know, it's funny because I get a lot of this. | ||
| I get emails from people that tell me, I just got one. | ||
| I mean, the emails are pouring in. | ||
| I'm looking on my computer screen here right now, and I'm getting lots of them. | ||
| Here's a good one. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I hope you make it. | ||
| It's not, I think like a good Klingon. | ||
| It was a good day to die. | ||
| Well, Geez. | ||
| Actually, there is that. | ||
| You know, there is that. | ||
| I mean, in the back of your mind, always, anytime you're going to do something like you're going to do, you've got to think a little that way. | ||
| That, look, I know what I'm doing. | ||
| I know there is some inherent risk. | ||
| And if I die, I die. | ||
| There's worse ways to go. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| And the thing is, I have no desire to hasten. | ||
| And when it comes time to launch, if I get that feeling that things aren't right, I just won't go. | ||
| I mean, fortunately, I have the option to say, no, it isn't right. | ||
| I'm not going to do it. | ||
| Because this is not... | ||
| I mean, if you have 200,000 people there or something. | ||
| I would hope that by the time it's standing up, ready to go, that I wouldn't be making a decision at that exact moment. | ||
| But nevertheless, you do get feelings about things. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| And you know, it's interesting, too. | ||
| When I go to jump out of an airplane, I still get to that door. | ||
| I still get a knot tied up in my stomach. | ||
| It's still the most difficult thing to do every time to push yourself out of that door. | ||
| But when I went on that MiG-25, I have to honestly admit that I never felt the slightest tinge of fear. | ||
| I had no anxiety. | ||
| I wasn't anxious. | ||
| I wasn't nervous. | ||
| And you think you can achieve that on top of your rocket? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| You know, I'll tell you the truth. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| When it comes time to climbing in and launching it, I have to admit, I don't really know. | ||
| I really hope I go through with it. | ||
| But hey, I'm a human being and I have fears like everyone else. | ||
| And I'm not doing this because I'm bored with living and it's time to go. | ||
| Yeah, I've got that. | ||
| No, I think you've got a healthy attitude about it. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello, Art. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Brian. | |
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, me and my brother, Stu, grew up just a couple blocks down the street from you. | |
| Doug and Stu Air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the people. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| Long time back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Small world. | |
| Yeah, I'll be coming from the same high school with two astronauts here pretty soon. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Art, I remember back in junior high or something that, you know, when other kids were bringing bugs pinned to cardboard and paper-mâché volcanoes to the science fair, Brian was building lasers. | ||
| Is that right, Brian? | ||
| Yeah, actually, fifth grade science fair. | ||
| I played second or, oh, I can't remember the hierarchy of state and county and city science fairs, but they made it on TV with my laser I built. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was quite interesting. | |
| We were all pretty intrigued. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| So what do you think of what he's doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm all for it. | |
| I wish him all the best. | ||
| My brother actually lives close to him and sisters. | ||
| And, you know, we're planning on going to the launch. | ||
| Might even come out for a visit sometime before then. | ||
| Yeah, I remember he emailed me a while back. | ||
| And yeah, yeah, come on out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How much of a distance between launch and landing are you looking at? | |
| Are you projecting? | ||
| Well, depending on what the winds, a lot of that will depend on what the upper winds are doing. | ||
| You know, all things being equal, it's a good chance that if I pass through winds blowing in one direction, eventually I'll hit another layer blowing in another direction. | ||
| But I'm going to be traveling so quickly that I'm going to pass through these layers of moving air very quickly, and they're not going to have an opportunity to push me in any one direction very much. | ||
| So it depends a whole lot on what the conditions are that day. | ||
| If there's not a lot of upper air activity, then I'm going to go pretty much straight up and come pretty much straight down. | ||
| Are you going to be depending on weather reports, high altitude? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I'll have to make sure that, you know, I don't want to go through the middle of the jet stream. | ||
| And if there's any real serious upper air activity, then I would postpone it. | ||
| But there are certain times of the year here, of course, like in spring and late summer when the air becomes nice and stable. | ||
| And I don't see that as being a big issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brian, when you were at the Cosmonaut Training, did you go on their vomit comment? | |
| The Ileution 76, yes I did. | ||
| And yes, I did. | ||
| After the seventh circuit, the interesting thing is that the plane would get to a certain altitude, then it would begin this power dive, and you'd get 25 seconds of 0G. | ||
| And then at the very end of that, when they're ready to pull up, these bright lights come on, and at that point, you've got to stop what you're doing and grab on and get down on the ground, because when that plane pulls up, it goes from 0 Gs to 3 Gs. | ||
| Oh, brother. | ||
| And you don't want to be floating up around the ceiling when the plane decides to pull out of its dive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It's a splash. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And during weightlessness, I felt great. | ||
| But each time we'd make that transition back to gravity, there was a little bit of a nausea that would hang on. | ||
| And it wasn't too bad the first time. | ||
| And no, the second time it wasn't too bad. | ||
| So it really wasn't the weightlessness producing. | ||
| No, not the weightlessness. | ||
| It was when gravity came back on. | ||
| That's when you felt bad. | ||
| And it was cumulative. | ||
| So after the seventh circuit, all there were, actually this is, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but there were seven. | ||
| That's why I asked. | ||
| Well, there were seven of us in the group, four men and three women. | ||
| All four men were hurling. | ||
| None of the women were. | ||
| Well, that is embarrassing. | ||
| It's embarrassing, but I figured it out. | ||
| It's really easy. | ||
| See, women are more capable of dealing with nausea because they have to put up with men. | ||
| That's a little reverse sexism there just to make everyone happy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We all see the truth. | |
| But I'll tell you what, I would have easily done it again because when I think of how many times I hung my head in old Mr. Porcelain for stupid reasons, this was one reason that was well worth it. | ||
| All right, Caller, we've got to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Hey, good talking with you. | ||
| And we'll hope to see you here someday. | ||
| You will. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Brian. | |
| Everybody, hold tight. | ||
| We're talking with Brian Walker. | ||
| And you know what I want to ask? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to ask what it's like to be weakling. | |
| I know you can see me now, here's a surprise. | ||
| I know that you have, cause there's magic in my eyes. | ||
| And he'll be able to see for miles and miles. | ||
| Take a look at the MiG-25 picture and imagine that time several. | ||
| Oh man, what a view. | ||
| It's coast to coast AM. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Premier Network. | |
| That was R Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this. | ||
| somewhere in time when you look at me you're gonna you're gonna lose that smile because i can see for miles and | ||
| miles i can see for miles and miles The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again. | ||
| Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing. | ||
| To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing. | ||
| All these things in our memories oar. | ||
| And they use them to come to us Why, why don't you sword? | ||
| Take this place of this strength, just for me. | ||
| Why, take a fear, take my place of my sea, it's for free. | ||
| I will tell you, work so hard just to end my fears. | ||
| Had to end my life all the time. | ||
| But by now, I know I shall somewhere in time with Art Bell continues courtesy of Premier Networks. | ||
| You know, I thought I'd go ahead and play this since Brian thought it would be appropriate, and I think it's appropriate too. | ||
| I've always loved this song, as you know, and this whole phrase, want to take a ride. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he does, and he's really serious about it. | |
| It's going to cost him a quarter of a million dollars, maybe more. | ||
| In fact, we'll ask about that in a moment. | ||
| But he's going where no private citizen has gone in a private rocket ever before. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| We'll get back to him and your questions in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll get back to him and your questions in a moment. | |
| You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2001. | ||
| All right, since you don't mind email, Brian, why don't you give out your email address? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Well, my website is rocketguy.com. | ||
| And of course, we have a link to that. | ||
| There's a link to that, right? | ||
| All right. | ||
| And I have to say up front that I've answered now over 4,000 emails since last July, and I try my best to answer every one, but right now I'm just getting flooded with them, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to make it. | ||
| You know, it's funny that people will write things that they wouldn't dare say directly to you. | ||
| A Pamela in Rochester, New York, fast blast me on the computer. | ||
| Art, be real. | ||
| This bonehead will be blown to smithereens. | ||
| That's what Pamela says. | ||
| Well, and, you know, she's got her opinion. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I'll be honest. | ||
| I don't blame people. | ||
| I can understand people thinking that way just because this is something that hasn't been done yet. | ||
| But my theory is that if you look at, consider, for instance, the four-minute mile. | ||
| Before someone ran faster than a four-minute mile, it was considered impossible for a human being to do that. | ||
| But once someone did it, then lots of other people started doing it because it was believed that it was a barrier that could be broken. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And what I'm doing is basically, because no one's ever done it before in an individual level, it's perceived as being impossible or something that can't be done. | ||
| Here, here. | ||
| And, you know, it may be, but see, the way it works. | ||
| I'm all for you. | ||
| And I'm telling you, I think you can do it. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Believe me, I've had that come from a lot of people. | ||
| And some people that are Very important because they know this field. | ||
| And my whole thinking is that I don't know that I can't do it, which means that I believe that I can do it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I really think you can. | ||
| I think you're doing it right. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Brian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello there. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Oh, Heady, Brian. | ||
| Hey, hey, listen to you for a while. | ||
| First time caller? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Long-time listener. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, my main question was going up and then coming down. | |
| First of all, a little bit of an update. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I'm a late caller. | |
| The other thing is I don't know where you're taking off from. | ||
| I just tuned in a while ago. | ||
| Oh, you did? | ||
| He's taking off from a point in Oregon, a place in Oregon. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What is your question? | ||
| In a place in Oregon. | ||
| Same place. | ||
| Oh, straight down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Same place? | |
| Hopefully. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The question is, I deal with the wind all the time in my work. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it goes different levels, different directions. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And how are you going to control that if the wind's in your favor? | |
| That's what I mean to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that really is right. | ||
| You're hoping the wind is in your favor. | ||
| Well, I'm hoping that, like I said, if you consider different altitudes, winds blow in different directions at different speeds. | ||
| And there again, if you're fortunate enough, you're going to pass through equal sections that have equal winds in different directions to compensate for each other. | ||
| But most importantly, I will be traveling so fast through those zones, and the silhouette of the rocket itself presents quite a small surface area. | ||
| I don't believe that the winds will have much effect on my overall movement. | ||
| Well, now that's on the way up, right? | ||
| On the way up. | ||
| But remember, even on the way down, I'm falling for the majority of this thing. | ||
| I'm falling very fast. | ||
| I'll reach Mach 2 just on freefall. | ||
| So I'm going to be moving very fast on my descent also. | ||
| Mach 2 on free fall. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Because when I begin to drop, there is effectively no air, and I just begin to accelerate at 32 feet per second per second until the air begins to cause a problem. | ||
| But that's good, because you don't want to linger. | ||
| we want to get down one now if you're not coming back fast enough to have the re-entry heat problems that require that the shields on a uh... | ||
| So they're hitting the atmosphere real hard. | ||
| They're hitting the atmosphere so fast that the frictional heat is enough to create that heat because it's there for a long period of time. | ||
| Now, the reason they do this is because they are using the atmosphere as a means of breaking. | ||
| Breaking, right. | ||
| Now, it's cheap from the sense that you're not burning fuel, but what it costs you is the negative side effect, which is the generation of so much heat. | ||
| If a returning spacecraft carried enough fuel on board that it could slow its speed very rapidly, then it would not be hitting the atmosphere at a speed high enough to cause frictional problems because you would have taken away that speed before you reached those levels of the atmosphere. | ||
| Okay, I'm hearing some clicking on our line, by the way. | ||
| I am too. | ||
| All right, we'll live with it. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Art. | |
| Good morning, Brian. | ||
| This is Christopher Calling from Honolulu, Hawaii, listening to you on KHVH at the big 8.30 a.m. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Well, I've got two questions. | ||
| I've got one for each of you folks. | ||
| I'll start with you, Art. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Man, you are like me. | ||
| I listen to what you say about space. | ||
| I think you probably have a lot of the same feelings I have, and that's I'd love to go out there. | ||
| And as an amateur rocketry man, if you had the wherewithal and the resources to build yourself a similar type of setup, would you go? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't even have to ask. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Easy answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| Now, Brian, you're the man. | ||
| You've got the right stuff. | ||
| The force is strong in you. | ||
| Let me tell you, you're going to be, I predict you're going to make it, okay? | ||
| And I send my prayers. | ||
| I'll be praying the whole time that you make it because we do need an alternative to NASA. | ||
| We do need private entrepreneurship. | ||
| We do need to show the world that a person can make their dreams come true in spite of everything. | ||
| And by all means, when you make it, when you come back to Earth, the question I have for you, and I'll get off the line and listen offline, and that is simply this. | ||
| You're obviously going to have a lot of book rights, movie rights. | ||
| There's going to be a whole lot of money you can be made off of this, enough to perhaps build the next step, which would be an orbital craft. | ||
| Are you thinking along those lines? | ||
| And again, I wish you Godspeed, and I'll hang out and listen to your answer. | ||
| Oh, hey, thanks a lot. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| That was nice. | ||
| I have a number of thoughts for after this. | ||
| And yes, there's a lot of potential of marketing, which is a whole different thing. | ||
| And I can't help but think of it because I'm in the business of obviously inventing and creating and then turning it into something. | ||
| But I try not to focus on that too much because it takes away from the mission itself. | ||
| But I would like to go and do bigger launches, higher launches, further launches, not continuing on this one-man crusade type thing that I'm doing this first one with, but I would like to move in that direction. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Stay good and close to the phone for me. | ||
| We're having some connection troubles or something or another. | ||
| I'm not sure what's changing exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| East of the Rockies. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Going once. | ||
| East of the Rockies, going twice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, speaking. | ||
| Speaker question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is he going to use for a guidance system and is he going to hand fly it? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, well, for the guidance system, there's two types of guidance. | ||
| One is aerodynamic, which is used obviously at the beginning of a flight when I launch, I'm using large, thin surfaces, so I have as much airflow interacting with as much surface area. | ||
| So at lower speeds, it will have a higher effect. | ||
| When I get up to a point that's too high to be using aerodynamic control, there are eight small 55-pound thrust rocket motors in the nose of the capsule. | ||
| You can see those on the website. | ||
| You can see them on the website, and they're in a circular fashion, 45 degrees around the nose. | ||
| Now, it's important to note that the guidance I'm talking about for this specific rocket is extremely simple. | ||
| It's to keep it pointed straight. | ||
| It doesn't have to follow a course or take it to a specific point. | ||
| It just has to keep it straight. | ||
| So the guidance system is a gyroscope hooked into a simple computer that will tell which rocket to fire or which rockets to fire, because they're every 45 degrees around, so theoretically burning two or more at one time and varying the length of each burn can also move you almost any possible position. | ||
| I won't be handling that because there's no sense in it. | ||
| The gyroscope can be sensed and the computer input can be done far faster. | ||
| Now if something were to happen to the computer, Well, there again, this is one of the things that really separates this project apart from so many others. | ||
| For instance, in a space shuttle situation, I could do several things. | ||
| One would be to have a manual backup that I could actually fire the engines myself and without practical experience and performing that task over and over and over and over again, there's a very good chance I'd screw things up pretty good. | ||
| Very good, yes. | ||
| But that option can still be there. | ||
| Second option could just simply be that if it goes out of whack, the important thing to consider is, and this is something I've discovered in so many rockets that I've launched, I've done all kinds of, you know, from the little solid rocket motor type to water rockets and big, big ones. | ||
| I'm talking big water rockets. | ||
| The rocket, if it takes off straight and things work out right, its natural desire is to continue going in the direction it's been set. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I'm relying a lot on the launch sequence with the large fins, because actually the fins are designed to break apart in three sections as I ascend. | ||
| And as I reach different points of speed, the fins drop 100%, or excuse me, they drop 50% in size each time. | ||
| And what that allows me to do is make the maximum use of the largest airfoil surface through a given speed range. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| But then as I go into that next speed range, rather than having the deficit of too much air surface area to be interacting with that much speed, it sheds its outer portions and reduces its speed, or excuse me, its size. | ||
| So now it's working in concert with the second speed range. | ||
| It does that twice. | ||
| It drops off two overlays. | ||
| So I'm able to gain the absolute, I'm going to squeeze every ounce of aerodynamic stability that I can get for those first 10, 12 seconds. | ||
| And then through those next two speed ranges, I'm going to also try to wring out as much without carrying the burden of too much airfoil or air surfaces to interact with. | ||
| Now, if I come up to Oregon, when you land, can I get an interview with you pretty quick, or will you concentrate on the networks and work your way down? | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I can sit here and say in a perfect world, I'd tell the networks they're all dictatorship. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| No, I really can't. | ||
| you know what i can i can only And that's all I can say. | ||
| But who knows? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's really kind of funny. | ||
| I took off last year for Russia in early June and went to this Star City to do this cosmonaut training. | ||
| And when I left, I had never had a radio interview. | ||
| I had never had any publicity. | ||
| I just hadn't been anywhere yet. | ||
| And while I was gone, the story came out in the local, the Oregonian newspaper ran a cover story on Father's Day. | ||
| And when I returned from Russia, my answering machine had gone offline. | ||
| My call right here had shown 100 calls in one day. | ||
| And from that point forward, it has just been this unbelievable interest from the public and from everybody. | ||
| Well, what does that tell you? | ||
| It tells me, well, and if I read the emails and read the kind of messages I get, it tells me two things, that people really are excited, interested, and really want to see me do this just to see that someone can do it and just to see that this is possible. | ||
| But doesn't that also say that NASA is somehow missing out on a lot of spirit that's out there right now that would get behind NASA or the President of the United States saying, by God, we're going to Mars by such and such, a Kennedy-esque kind of statement, you know, setting a national goal. | ||
| We're sort of drifting these days. | ||
| And as you pointed out, kind of to the rear, we're drifting to the rear. | ||
| We're not making progress. | ||
| Don't you think there's a lot of pent-up emotion? | ||
| People like us who want to see us go, damn it? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's two areas of pent-up emotion. | ||
| I think that's one area. | ||
| And then I think the other area, and there again, this is also reflected in my emails, is that there's an overall feeling about everything, not just in the space program, but just what life has become. | ||
| We put so much focus on individuals. | ||
| You know, it seems like all of our attention nowadays is on athletes or entertainers. | ||
| And I think that there's kind of a missing element that people need to see. | ||
| And, you know, the weird thing is, I never even in my wildest dreams thought of myself in a position of being someone that encouraging people onward in dreams or just looking at life a little differently. | ||
| And it's really quite interesting to get the kind of emails that I get. | ||
| Some of them have been extremely emotionally evoking to read people's. | ||
| Well, can you tell the difference? | ||
| In other words, if you, for example, go with the police sometimes, you'll go and you'll see a jumper, and they'll be up on a bridge. | ||
| And there's always these fools down below saying, jump, jump, jump. | ||
| And they just want to see it happen. | ||
| So that's one group. | ||
| And then there's another group of really forward-thinking people who understand what you're trying to achieve and what an incredible thing it would be. | ||
| So do you get both of those? | ||
| Oh, I get, yeah, I do. | ||
| Actually, I get very few emails of people that I think are waiting to watch a disaster. | ||
| I get a small number of some pretty weird ones just from some pretty strange people. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But that's a tiny, I'm sure you're familiar with that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I got to push the button. | ||
| My fault. | ||
| West of the Rockies, now you're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello? | |
| Yes, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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You there? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm here. | |
| Okay, good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Arthur. | |
| Hi, Brian. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As you know, the United States and other places around the world have specific launch locations into outer space, right? | |
| And the United States has missile silos and stuff that are unspecified. | ||
| So how do you know with the altitudes that you're reaching that it might not set off an early detection warning system in some other country that you might start World War III is what he's asking? | ||
| I won't be going high enough to be able to trigger early warning. | ||
| In fact, my heat signature probably wouldn't even be, since I'm using steam, probably wouldn't even be detectable from space. | ||
| But this is going to be such a publicized event, and it's going to be happening within such a very small territorial area because stop and think about it again. | ||
| 35 miles seems so high, but if you think about how far 35 miles is, it's not really that far in the grand scale of things. | ||
| Nevertheless, we have very sensitive satellites, so do the well. | ||
| I mean, wouldn't it be horrible if you got right up there to the highest point and you saw all of these rockets in the boost phase down below you? | ||
| And then we found out we really did have a Star Wars. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| All that stuff they said wasn't true. | ||
| They actually built the damp. | ||
| Well, I'm going to make sure that it's well there again. | ||
| There'll be certain things. | ||
| Or if you really want to hear a dark scenario, we've got Star Wars, and the embarrassment would be too much for the powers at B, and one little push of a button and I don't think that would happen. | ||
| Listen, you good for one more hour? | ||
| You want to see it? | ||
| This is fun. | ||
| This is fun. | ||
| All right, good. | ||
| Then stay right there. | ||
| Brian Walker, the rocket guy, is my guest. | ||
| He's getting ready to do it just about exactly one year from right now. | ||
| 30 to 35 miles up. | ||
| And if you want to see the rocket that he's building to do it, it's on my website right now at artbell.com. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is something you've got to see. | |
| Leave me. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
unidentified
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You are listening to Art Bell somewhere in time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| We've been traveling far without a home. | ||
| Not without a star. | ||
| Free. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Networks presents Art Bell somewhere in time. | ||
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2001. | ||
| Incidentally, Brian, according to one of my Fast Blasters, has an animated demonstration of the rocket launch to landing on his website. | ||
| So you might want to catch that. | ||
| We'll have him for another hour. | ||
| Lots of questions out there. | ||
|
unidentified
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an amazing thing this man is getting ready to do it will be right back the You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time. | |
| Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2001. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM from May 21, 2001. | ||
| I suppose this is a silly question, but somebody is asking, Brian, do you plan to take out or can you even get any insurance for this? | ||
| Well, I haven't even looked into it. | ||
| You haven't? | ||
| No, I. Well, at this point in time, I have no heirs, and I still have my toy royalties that I'll pass on to my folks or something. | ||
| But, of course, then there is Natasha. | ||
| Okay, stay good and close to that phone for me. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| The key is pretty much if your lips are touching it, you're in the right place. | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| Oh, that's so much better. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| So, in other words, you're self-insured. | ||
| I'm self-insured at this point for what my requirements would be. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Oh, wait a minute. | ||
| Darn button. | ||
| West of the Rockies, now you're on the air. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My name is Bill, and I'm listening to you on KFIAM 640 Radio in Los Angeles. | ||
| The big one, yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And I'm a special effects artist in Hollywood, and I've been in it for about 33 years. | ||
| And I've done propulsion projects before, and I may have crossed paths with somebody that Brian might be working with. | ||
| I'm not really quite sure. | ||
| Brian, are you working with a David Gibble by chance? | ||
| No, that name does not ring a bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, David wrote a book called The Amazing Rocket Belt Handbook back in the early 90s. | |
| He was doing it on the rocket pack. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, and I produced a video for him, and he was doing distillation of hydrogen peroxide like you have to be doing for your project to fly these personal belts. | |
| And he had moved up to Oregon, and that's why I'm asking. | ||
| He might be very close to you. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| But yeah, I've built my own distillation facility here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ah, okay. | |
| I worked with David a number of years ago. | ||
| We flew the, in 1988, we flew the first of its kind jet-powered flex-wing ultralight airplane out at El Mirage, California. | ||
| I think I saw that because I used to follow the ultralight market quite a bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Kit Planes Magazine. | |
| Yeah, Kiplanes, Kiplanes, yeah, they had it in there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, so you'll see a profile on me there in Special Effects. | |
| But I worked with David at that time, and he was developing his own hydrogen peroxide systems. | ||
| What month and year was that? | ||
|
unidentified
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That was appeared in February 1989 with the revival of the Piper Cub on the cover. | |
| Okay, February 89. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Okay, well, I have archives of all those magazines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Just another thing I wanted to say, too. | ||
| Since I'm into science fiction a lot, having done these projects over the years, I don't know if this is accidental or a subliminal thing. | ||
| Are you aware how much your ship that I've looked at on the internet bears a resemblance to Zephyrin Cochran's first warp ship in the Star Trek mythology? | ||
| No, I'm not, but it's weird because someone else just emailed me saying that exact same thing about the spaceship from space 1999. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, really? | |
| Yeah, those pods in space 1999. | ||
| Yeah, and you know what? | ||
| I never, no, you know, this evolved from one shape to the next to the next. | ||
| It just evolved naturally to get to where it's at. | ||
| Because people said you're going to die. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Art? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, one more thing for you, too. | |
| Just as an aside, just to show how all of this world comes up into funny little circles, the jet engines we used on our Jet Ultralight, they were the same engines that were used by Bob Lazar, and he put an afterburner on those, and he used those to power that jet-powered Honda out on the salt flats. | ||
| And that's what got Edward Teller to see his work in that newspaper article. | ||
| Right you are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Gene Gluharoff, the man who invented those engines. | |
| We both worked with Gene out in the high desert in Hesperia, California. | ||
| I'll be darned. | ||
| So it's a small world. | ||
| It is a small world. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
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Art, it's a pleasure talking to you. | |
| I love your show. | ||
| I've listened to you for years. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| Well, I mean, that was an outrageous comment I made, but I mean, basically, it was true. | ||
| From your first design, capsule design, to the one that appears to be quite workable right now, there have been several steps where people have looked at it and basically said, hey, you're going to die, right? | ||
| Yeah, in fact, here's a perfect example. | ||
| As you mentioned, I have that animation, the animation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, just moments before I began with you tonight, I was viewing the brand new one. | ||
| That animation was on the old design and method, and it's just really outdated. | ||
| But I have a brand new animation I was going to try and have up on my site by now, but it's probably going to be a couple more days. | ||
| And it shows now the actual rocket exactly how it's going to look, and the animation is much closer to reality now. | ||
| See, when I originally started working on this project, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. | ||
| And the one thing about the rocket belt, whenever you've seen it fly, it's very stable because the thrust is coming out above the weight. | ||
| The feet are hanging down, and the nozzles, you know, are up at shoulder length. | ||
| And my theory was that I was going to propel this rocket by putting the engine up top and pulling it up with the center of gravity below the thrust because this would result in stability. | ||
| Well, if I was going to maybe hover all the way up, maybe that would be the case. | ||
| But too many people began pointing out to me that, you know, Goddard had tried this in the beginning, and for a number of reasons, it proves to be unstable and unsafe. | ||
| And I had lots of people, actually, giving me direction and pointing me there. | ||
| And once I realized the folly of my original design, I said, okay, well, scrap that. | ||
| I'm going to go with this other one. | ||
| Because by all means, I am not a real rocket scientist. | ||
| I mean, I'm basically utilizing common sense and then getting advice when I need it and making the changes I have to make. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I want the thing to work. | ||
| I don't want the thing to not work to be able to claim that it was all my brand new idea. | ||
| Obviously, you want it to work. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm calling from Calgary, Alberta on CHQR 77, All-Night Radio. | |
| We're listening to you. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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And three things for Brian. | |
| Number one, after your radio time this evening, I doubt very much if you'll be single very long. | ||
| There'll be so many women out there wanting you. | ||
| Secondly, who has the hamburger and Johnny concession for the 200 or 300,000 people that are going to be there? | ||
| And thirdly, in the poem High Flight, he reaches out and touches the face of God. | ||
| I think what's going to happen is you're going to be combing God's hair. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, there is something about going to the altitude you're going. | ||
| Somebody wrote a book called The Overview Effect. | ||
| We were talking about that the other night. | ||
| Being able to see the world as they see it from low Earth orbit, or even as you're going to see it from 30 or 35 miles, gives somebody. | ||
| They're never quite the same afterwards. | ||
| And that's why I was saying you've got to have a window. | ||
| I mean, you can have all the camera shots in the world, but it's not the same as, even though it's going to be a few short. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, I will be able to look out. | ||
| It just won't be, it's not configured in the way I have to sit in it with my back to the ground and everything else. | ||
| It's not conducive to taking the real long view. | ||
| This is a glimpse of what I might be able to see someday when I'm orbiting for a couple days. | ||
| From that altitude, what will your view be? | ||
| In other words, what will you be able to see from, say, 30 or 35 miles? | ||
| Well, someone told me that from the MiG-25 to 8,000 feet, you could see 500 miles in all directions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I would imagine if I'm going to be going a little more than twice that high, I don't know if it's log root progressive or whatever, as far as does that mean I'm going to be twice as high and see 1,000 miles, or maybe does that mean I see 1,500 miles? | ||
| So you'll be looking way out over the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| Well, yeah, looking at the difference between 60,000 and 80,000, the difference was quite remarkable. | ||
| Probably down to Baja. | ||
| Yeah, I'd probably be able to see to a distance like that. | ||
| Boy. | ||
| And then again, you know, it's just that, yes, it's that progressive moving out each step. | ||
| But it's interesting, you brought up high flight. | ||
| When I was real young, back before cable and everything, TV used to go off at midnight, and of course they always did the obligatory lowering of the flag and taps. | ||
| But one show used to always, one station used to always run this high flight. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Pictures in the background of the guy flying in the jet. | ||
| And I just used to love to always have a treat to me if I was actually up late enough and awake to be able to catch high flight. | ||
| What was the line at the end to reach out and touch the face of God? | ||
| And that's kind of like always part of this thing, too, is that I have a very strong faith in God. | ||
| And what makes this a little bit more palatable to do is I've already reconciled the fact that, yes, I will die someday. | ||
| I concluded that. | ||
| And although I don't plan to go in this method at this point in time, in relative terms, 44. | ||
| 44. | ||
| there's worse ways to go over a lot worse ways to go and only the worst with go but I mean, think about it. | ||
| I mean, this is really bizarre when you consider that I didn't go to college. | ||
| I got out of high school. | ||
| That was enough school for me because I'm dyslexic and a certain level of ADHD. | ||
| And that makes normal schooling torture. | ||
| And I failed so many times before I got to the point, I think between ages of 20 and 35, I moved back to my folks five or six times because I was absolutely going to be either homeless or moving back in. | ||
| Because I'd go off to pursue some dream and would fail so miserably that was it. | ||
| And because I hung out and didn't give up, I made it to this point where now I'm actually not only able to realize my dream, but I'm actually creating it. | ||
| And I've created this little world around me where I have this shop and this property and my income stream comes from toy royalties, so it gives me the freedom and the time to pursue this without having to do the day job each day. | ||
| Are you doing this all alone or are you getting help? | ||
| I have one helper, a young fellow, Dave, a young guy that actually had emailed me after my first round of publicity last June. | ||
| And he's a young guy that lives here in Bend, and he's got experience in composites, a lot of experience in composites, and a real nice guy and bright and sharp, and he can do welding. | ||
| And so he comes in a few days a week and helps me deal with some of the stuff, building the molds and everything else. | ||
| But other than that, I'm handling pretty much everything by myself. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wildcard Line, you're on the air. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Another great show, Art. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Brian, geez, I can't believe this. | |
| This is great. | ||
| Only in America, huh? | ||
| Only in America. | ||
| Only in America. | ||
| That's my message to the other parts of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, are you familiar with, you know, Russia doesn't have much money, so they've been getting money from our country actually to support some of their rocket missions. | |
| And remember, Pizza High put a big sticker on their thing, and maybe you could get some money from some companies, and you could go further next time. | ||
| You know, he's got a point. | ||
| What about an advertisement on your rocket? | ||
| Well, I have been, I've got a number of corporate sponsors I would like to see sponsor this that I have not made any real attempts yet because who would you like? | ||
| Well, I try and do things backwards because I'm dyslexic, okay? | ||
| So instead of going out looking for the best companies or the biggest or the ones who would be perfect, I look at the companies that I already support. | ||
| I have a BMW, a little M-Roadster, which is basically the rocket car. | ||
| The thing is so staying fast. | ||
| And I love that car. | ||
| It's a great, well, I don't love it. | ||
| I like the car a lot. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| So BMW. | ||
| It's BMW. | ||
| And so BMW and their whole thing about driven to excellence and performance and stuff like that, it's the perfect mix of a sponsorship because there's all kinds of great commercials you can do with the two. | ||
| But before I approach these people, I've been wanting to get to a certain level so that when I do talk to them, they can see that this isn't just some guy with a water heater and plywood fins stuck to it with nails going to blow up half the neighborhood. | ||
| This is serious. | ||
| And give them a reason to take a strong enough look at saying this could be a real good thing. | ||
| And rather than becoming an endorser for a company because they wrote me the biggest check, it's going to be I selected companies that I already support. | ||
| So I've got a list of several companies that I'm giving some thought over the next few months here. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| So you might do that, Colin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that sounds great. | |
| One thing I was concerned about your safety, I was thinking something. | ||
| If you blackout, do you have an altimeter that will automatically do the things that you're supposed to do? | ||
| Because if you blackout, you're in a lot of shoulders and all that. | ||
| Everything that the things that I have to do are things actually that are automatic. | ||
| The only thing I have to do is immediately abort if I decide based on what I'm feeling or what the ground crew is telling me. | ||
| Other than that, the separation of the fin sections and all these other things occur automatically. | ||
| And that's the nice thing about the simplicity with everything here. | ||
| They're very simple things to happen. | ||
| So if you were to black out at 6 Gs or 8 Gs, or you pulled more than you thought, and you blacked out, conceivably you could take the whole ride unconscious. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because even without the automatic ones, the ground crew would be able to continually monitor and fire things that I wasn't able to do. | ||
| And there again, it would suddenly become now only in the case of a severe or somewhat severe equipment failure would that occur. | ||
| Okay, here's one for you. | ||
| Could the ground crew abort the flight and blow your little hind end of that way? | ||
| They would have that ability. | ||
| Yeah, if I want them to, yes. | ||
| That's an easy thing to do. | ||
| Everything is designed with a positive safety. | ||
| Yeah, everything is designed in the failure mode, it fails to the positive side of what I wanted anyway. | ||
| If that makes any sense. | ||
| No, it makes all the sense. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then also, like, for instance, suppose you go back to this scenario. | ||
| I'm blacked out. | ||
| It's reached apogee. | ||
| It's on its way down. | ||
| Now, there may be something that's supposed to trigger to fire something, and if that fails, that might normally, that would be it. | ||
| However, at a different altitude, there was another thing that was supposed to occur if my speed was still at a certain point. | ||
| Everyone that Skydive nowadays jumps with a little device that's called an AAD, and it senses your fall rate, and when you reach 1,000 feet above the ground, I think it's 1,000 feet, but you reach a certain level, and if it senses you're traveling at a faster speed than what would be considered under a canopy, it'll automatically fire your reserve. | ||
| And they've saved countless, countless lives, and no one jumps without them anymore. | ||
| And there will be very similar type things in here that if I get to a certain point and all of a sudden it realizes that something failed earlier on and now there's still a problem going on, then it would do its own thing at that point. | ||
| So I've tried to put in redundant and double redundant systems. | ||
| Sounds fairly safe, actually. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| This is Dale calling from Texas. | ||
| Hi, Dale. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've got a couple of questions for you, Brian. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does your vehicle have a name yet? | |
| Earthstar 1. | ||
|
unidentified
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Earthstar 1, okay. | |
| How long will your launch last? | ||
| Are you going to rotate the Earth? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No. | ||
| Suborbital flight, straight up, straight down, total duration, probably around 15 minutes. | ||
| These are people that have joined the show late, I suppose. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I have. | |
| I missed it earlier. | ||
| And how much power does it take to launch? | ||
| I mean, you know, 747 MD-80s are 280 miles an hour when they take off. | ||
| What is your speed at takeoff? | ||
| Well, my speed at takeoff is not so much a matter of speed, it's acceleration rate. | ||
| Because obviously I go from a standing still position to accelerating upwards. | ||
| And the speed, I'm hoping to accelerate to about around the 140-mile an hour range in the first four to five seconds. | ||
| And then from that point on, it's just a steady increase in velocity. | ||
| And once I clear that six to ten second danger zone, if it's still on a straight course upwards, then there's very little that can go wrong from that point on. | ||
| Have you noticed that most of the callers this morning have been guys? | ||
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| In fact, I think actually all of them, I believe, so far. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| And I just reached out. | ||
| My computer went into hibernate because I hadn't touched it for a while. | ||
| But I got an email from a young woman who is in flight operations, and she was calling us on the thing about women not just getting it. | ||
| She's one that does get it. | ||
| She sent me a very nice message, and she said that she does get it. | ||
| But yeah, you're right. | ||
| The callers have all been real. | ||
| Welcome to the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello? | |
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, Mr. Bell. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, first of all, God bless you, sir. | |
| I have to inform you that all of the years that you've been kind to me and allow me to speak on your show have been so courteous to me. | ||
| I thank you for all of that, sir. | ||
| You're very welcome. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I'm going down other paths. | |
| This is the last time I'll be calling in. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Oh, well. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I love you and your family very much, sir. | |
| And whenever I can, I'll listen in. | ||
| And one of these days, I hope to shake your hand and bring you incredible gifts of appreciation. | ||
| That's very kind. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I wanted to say to your guest, Brian, Godspeed, sir. | |
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| And I hope that all of Mr. Bell's listeners will be praying for you as I will. | ||
| And really hope that not only for your success, but I really hope that you can keep in contact with Mr. Bell because so many fine people listen to a show as you're finding out. | ||
| And I'd like to see you keep in touch with Mr. Bell. | ||
| Well, a lot of people, certainly, that are interested in this effort. | ||
| And listen, my friend, you keep listening, and whatever happens to you, stay in touch, all right? | ||
| Take care. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| Here's that song that you wanted when you're up there, I believe. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nothing watching. | |
| It kind of fits. | ||
|
unidentified
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Never reaching the end. | |
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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This is Premiere Networks. | |
| That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| On this, somewhere in Time. | ||
| Beauty at a wind with these eyes before. | ||
| Judgment truth is, I can't say it anymore because I love Tuesday | ||
| Afternoon I'm just beginning to see Now I'm on my way It doesn't matter to me Chasing the clouds away Something | ||
| Calls to me The trees are growing me near I've got to find out why Those gentle voices I hear Explain it all with a sigh I've got to find out why | ||
| I'm on my way I've got to find out why I'm on my way I've got to find out why I'm on my way I've got to find out why I'm on my way I've got to find out why I'm on my way You're listening to Art | ||
| Bell, Somewhere in Time Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2001 Actually, if you listen to the words, you understand a lot Or maybe you didn't even have to hear it to understand But Brian Walker is planning on launching himself into space | ||
| 30, 35 miles up If you want to know more about it, there are various ways His website, we've got all kinds of pictures We've got two pages of pictures on the website Of what he's building right now to accomplish this I suggest you take a look Before you | ||
|
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chuckle, I suggest you take a look Brian will be right back You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM From May 22, 2001 | |
| Well, all right, back to what we go Brian Walker is my guest They call him the Rocket Guy And for good reasons Brian, welcome back Thank you You're going to get probably a lot of email because of this Oh, I keep going and looking at it every so often It's scary It's pretty scary I treat every email as if it's me writing someone else And it makes it really difficult to ignore | ||
| them And I want to answer everyone But, man It's because people have very strong feelings about this Well Stronger than our government knows And if they knew how strong I think they wouldn't have been dicking around for the last 30 plus years Oh, no, I mean, it's ridiculous We should have never left the moon We should have never left without human presence Of course not And it just doesn't make any sense That the nearest body Unless | ||
| there is stuff up there Whether they don't want anyone to know about I have never been able to understand Now that they believe there would be abundant sources of water In the form of frozen ice in the poor regions So you suspect that as a possibility? | ||
| Well, from what I understand They're quite certain that there's large deposits Oh, no, I didn't mean that I was referring to the things that they don't want seen Oh, I don't know We know I personally No, I personally don't think I think it's just a big rock The moon? | ||
| The moon How about Mars? | ||
| Just a bigger rock? | ||
| Or do you think there might be some artifacts there? | ||
| We know I'll tell you I used to be a real big believer in alien beings coming here But over the past couple of years I've tried to figure out exactly why would they do that Anybody that could come here Obviously has a technology that's so far advanced above us They wouldn't need to be probing us I mean, what are they going to learn from us? | ||
| And, you know, maybe it exists I just don't tend to believe that anyone would have come the great vast distances to come here No, but it certainly is possible there was at one time life on Mars There could have been I mean, it's hard to say You know, who's to say that its orbit has always been that far out? | ||
| It may have been closer to the sun Well, you know, we might be able to say if we would go there That's true All right, let's get to phones A lot of people First-time caller line You're on the air with Brian Walker Hi Hi, Brian Hi, Art Ah, you complain about the lack of the female genitality | ||
|
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Yeah, there you go You complain that we get it just by asking I've been trying to get through all night I get disconnected from the line that's on for a long time And I don't get redialed Well, hey, I'm glad you made it through Because now it wasn't all, guys Yeah You guys are so naive about the space program I | |
| mean, Art, I've been listening to you for years I'm Isometria This is Isometria I'm calling from Santa Cruz, California Yes About three blocks from the ocean Oh, yes Well, we had a... | ||
| We... | ||
| I'm just asking Naive in what way? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, why don't they want us to go into space? | |
| Duh! | ||
| Because they own space in their minds And they have the plan to completely control everything And of course they don't want us to be able to go into space But I pray that this is the beginning of it And I'm so, you know... | ||
| Well, I agree I'm so happy that... | ||
| I agree, too This is happening and that Brian exists we're we're on the edge of an era of a time I mean look at Timothy Leary he would be ecstatic about this dude he would and he would be ecstatic and I and I knew Tim a little bit. | ||
| As you know, he was launched. | ||
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unidentified
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He was launched. | |
| And the Moody Blues did a song about him. | ||
|
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Well, of course, indeed. | |
| We've got the triangle thing going here. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know. | |
| I think I have a connection maybe with the Moody Blues. | ||
| There's some people here in town that are real close to Justin Hayward. | ||
| We'll try to get this going. | ||
| I have connections to the Moody Blues. | ||
|
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Come on, check out my website. | |
| That would be so great. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm going to. | |
| I'm going to email you. | ||
| But when you said you've only worked on this for six years, I mean, you've really worked on it ever since you were seven years ago. | ||
| No, you're right. | ||
| This has been, you know, for most of my life, I wasn't working on it per se. | ||
| It was a driving force that kept my interest levels high in the whole aerospace and technology fields. | ||
| And I guess maybe for most of my life, I never really thought that I was ever really going to do it. | ||
| It was a childhood dream that I'd had. | ||
| And over the course of time between, you know, 10 and, what, 36 years old, it never seemed a really attainable dream. | ||
| And when I got to a point of realizing I was going to be in a position of maybe doing something kind of grand, it just kind of just came back to me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Having the money. | |
| Having the money, having the time, having the skills. | ||
| You know, building my little submarine. | ||
| I lived on a little island in Fiji where they filmed the Blue Lagoon movie. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, my gosh. | |
| And I lived there 86 and 87 building a little two-man recreational submarine. | ||
| And it was designed to just take two people below the surface in an airtight bubble, and then there was a large tail that stuck up the back to a float. | ||
| So once you got to an eye-level depth of about four feet underwater, the float stopped on the surface and kept you suspended there. | ||
| Did it work? | ||
| It worked, but it had a lot of problems because the location I built it in was so lacking that I had to take too many shortcuts. | ||
| But it did prove the point and prove the concept was workable. | ||
| Why did you, thank you, ma'am, as a matter of curiosity, why did you go there? | ||
| Why were you there? | ||
| You just wanted to be there? | ||
| No, actually the way it worked out was that I had been looking for years for someone to fund and to back this deal, and I met the guy who owns this island. | ||
| He's actually from Vancouver, Washington, and he owns this island. | ||
| It's called Turtle Island. | ||
| And he was so intrigued with my project that he said that if I wanted to come down and build it on his island, he would fund the whole effort, and I'd go down and live there and build it there. | ||
| But he liked the idea of having me do it on his island, kind of, you know, like how many guys have an island with a guy building a submarine on it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And unfortunately, the shop there was basically designed to upkeep maintenance on the little buildings and the little berets on the island. | ||
| Not for something of the magnitude you were. | ||
| Yeah, but just pictures of it on my website and stuff. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wild Guardline, you're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Art. | |
| Wish you good morning from Juno, Alaska, listening to you on KINY, 800 a.m. | ||
| Juneau, yes, indeed. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I was wondering here for Brian. | |
| I've been intrigued. | ||
| I've just started listening within the last hour here. | ||
| But I was wondering if he's not a licensed pilot, how he's going to be legal when transitioning through Class A airspace. | ||
| Well, I'm not flying. | ||
| I'm not flying anything. | ||
|
unidentified
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So the FAA doesn't then recognize that you have to be on any kind of flight plan for that transition through the airspace? | |
| Well, as it exists right now, there's really not any FARS covering private rocket launches, not to my knowledge, or that type of thing. | ||
| I'm not flying. | ||
| I'm traveling through airspace, but I'm not flying through it. | ||
| I'm not operating an aircraft under my controls. | ||
| I'm basically in a ballistic missile that is traveling through that. | ||
| Now, the FAA does not own that airspace. | ||
| It only regulates it. | ||
| And if I request a waiver to travel through that airspace and my flight is deemed not hazardous to the public and there's enough notification, which is what they do when, for instance, when the Model Rocket Club decides to launch, then there's no reasonable explanation that they could deny me based on what the parameters are for granting access to that part of the air. | ||
| FAA doesn't own it. | ||
| I mean, that's free space above us. | ||
| I respect that they regulate it because I appreciate the safety that I travel in. | ||
| But by no means am I out to do anything that would harm myself, let alone anyone else. | ||
| And I just want to do things correctly. | ||
| But I'm just asking for permission to travel through this controlled airspace at a time and place that will not interfere with the general public. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, and if I may follow up, Brian, with a follow-up question to that, how has your interfacing been with the FAA? | |
| I know in Keen Eye, they do a lot of government missile launches, and they send out a lot of notems to the pilots well in advance, advising them to stay clear of that peninsula area during the launches. | ||
| How has the FAA been treating you in getting the waivers and going into airspace around your launch site in Oregon? | ||
| To be honest, and I was talking about this a little earlier, I think just before you came on, that I at this point haven't even dealt with them because right now, the way I look at it is what it's taking me to get this rocket finished, completed, built, and knowing that it's going to work is such a huge thing to overcome. | ||
| That when I come closer to the launch date, when I know my location and when I have all those things figured out because I'm choosing a place that is as far away from commercial air corridors as possible, and when all those things are done, then I will go make my application. | ||
| It just doesn't do me any good right now because there's no sense beginning a fight this far away from it. | ||
| In the New York Post article, it says you will have spent about a quarter million dollars, about $250,000. | ||
| Is that still a realistic figure? | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| The budget's gone up a bit, for instance. | ||
| I had never really put in the going to Russia, the couple trips I've made to Russia has been training in the sense of getting me used to certain situations. | ||
| And I hadn't really given that a whole lot of thought. | ||
| I've probably got about that much into it right now, and we'll probably spend about half again that much. | ||
| I expect to probably have $300,000 to $400,000 into it. | ||
| I see. | ||
| Larry in Santa Clara asks via computer: Art, at what minimum altitude would Brian call the launch a success? | ||
| I mean, if I went to a certain point and came back, well, I'll tell you what, if I launched this thing and it actually went up and only went to, well, I would call it a success if I got 35 miles high and come back. | ||
| I will call it a, I'm trying to think of a word that would be not success, but not anything close to failure. | ||
| If this thing goes 20 miles high, I'm going to be probably just exactly as thrilled as I'd be if it went 35. | ||
| And I'd probably feel the same way if it went 10 miles. | ||
| And if the thing went up 5,000 feet and I still managed to make it down safety and walk away, I'd probably have just as much of a feeling of pride as if I'd gone full distance. | ||
| Is there any chance that you could go significantly higher than you think you're going to go? | ||
| In other words, that without a full bore test, what if you went a lot higher than you thought? | ||
| No, that wouldn't be possible because, for instance, I'm dealing with some pretty strong sets of self-physical loss. | ||
| And I've got something that weighs so much weight, has so much fuel, and it can produce so much thrust. | ||
| There is exactly a certain point that it can only get to. | ||
| So your margin of error for the exact altitude you're going to reach is how big? | ||
| Well, the margin of error for my safety is huge. | ||
| No, no, no, not that. | ||
| The margin of error of the exact altitude you're going to reach. | ||
| It would probably be within 5 to 10%. | ||
| So I might make it to 40 miles. | ||
| I might only make it to 30. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of unknowns because, you know, obviously I have not been able to conduct wind size tests to know what the drag coefficient is or calculate. | ||
| Obviously, the drag as it begins throughout the flight. | ||
| Those things are things that I really can't, and quite frankly, I don't care about. | ||
| I don't need to know to that precise. | ||
| There again, this is not like I'm trying to put something into an exact polar orbit or an exact position in the heavens. | ||
| I just want to go up and down. | ||
| I've got you. | ||
| It's the easiest, the simplest thing I can think of to do is go up, come down, get out, wave to the crowd. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Go up, come down, get out, wave to the crowd. | ||
| If I do that, I don't care where I went, how high I went. | ||
| All right. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on here with Brian Walker. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
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How are you doing, Mr. Bell? | |
| Fine. | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm in Jackson, Mississippi. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Mr. Walker? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I appreciate the power in your spirit. | ||
| I think if anyone thinks you're loony or has any doubts about it, just go back to the Evil Knievel launch years ago. | ||
| He probably could have used your technology. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank River Canyon. | |
| But I just wanted to have a couple of questions about the capsule design. | ||
| Do you have any windows? | ||
| Is the design more of the cone-shaped rocket? | ||
| I keep visualizing this Mercury mission thing, like the old Mercury capsules. | ||
| Oh, you haven't seen it on the website or anything? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, sorry, I don't have a computer. | |
| Physical description of the capsule is 10 feet long. | ||
| Its widest part is 52 inches. | ||
| It's 52 inches in diameter at its widest point. | ||
| And it's a bullet shape with a little bit of a dolphin type of an extended pointed nose. | ||
| And there's two small viewports that I can look out of. | ||
| And there's windscreens that fit over the openings so that the airflow over the capsule does not get affected at all by it. | ||
|
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Are you going to be monitored for your heart rate? | |
| Yeah, I'll have some rudimentary meta. | ||
| I'll have a heart rate monitor and probably maybe a blood pressure monitor just for the sake of recording what I want to see that chart. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I'd like to see that. | |
| Yeah, blood pressure. | ||
| Anyway, I had one more thing to add, a couple of more songs for y'all that Harry Nielsen, Spaceman, Major Tom, David Bowie, Rocket Man, definitely by Elton John in 2001, Space Odyssey. | ||
| I already thought of Rocket Man. | ||
| Too obvious. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, well, I know, but, you know, it's just like, it's almost there. | |
| Yeah, I know. | ||
|
unidentified
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I sure appreciate y'all. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Welcome to the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Brian Walker. | ||
| Not a lot of time left. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, this is Margaret and Littleton. | |
| Margaret! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Number one, it's not a guy thing, except for the Hooters part. | |
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, you've got to allow me something in there. | ||
|
unidentified
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It really has to do with whether, as a kid, you were reading, you know, the Heinlein Juveniles where the kids build a spaceship in the backyard. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That said, I have to admit that when I heard you were going to be pulling 6Gs, my immediate thought was, darn, he's going to black out just in time to miss the best part. | ||
| So I'm really glad to hear that you can pull 6Gs without blacking out. | ||
| Yes, I can do that. | ||
| I did it in the Russian centrifuge, and actually, I did not have a bad time at all. | ||
| I mean, if I had to play a flute, I probably would have had a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ah, you don't have to play a flute. | |
| I don't have to play a flute, so. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Number three, another song that is perhaps not totally appropriate, but you might enjoy. | ||
| Diana Gallagher, a reconsideration of anatomical docking maneuvers in a zero-gravity environment. | ||
| Well, that's a mouthful. | ||
| It sure is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Better known as zero-g sex. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You know, that's a kind of, thanks, Margaret. | ||
| The last thing I wanted to ask was something I didn't ask earlier, and that is, what in God's name does it feel like to be weightless? | ||
| The closest you can get to it is swimming, really, on earth. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's not at all, for instance, it's not at All like free fall, because in free fall, you're aware of this pressure wave on you. | ||
| But when everything just goes weightless, it's just a, you know, if it wasn't for the visuals around you, it's like for instance, if you were sitting in a pitch-pitch, dark, black room and you went weightless, you'd probably notice very little. | ||
| You don't sense much until you go to move or until you try to interact with something around you, and then you see how all of a sudden, how weird it is. | ||
| Your brain is telling you that that water droplet shouldn't be floating in front of your face, and I shouldn't be able to do flips and thins in one spot. | ||
| Is it fun? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, during those 25 seconds, it's just, it's incredible. | ||
| It's really incredible. | ||
| There's nothing like it. | ||
| I mean, it's a truly unique experience. | ||
| How long you won't have very long in a weightless condition. | ||
| Your weightless condition will be produced, not exactly like the vomit comet does, in a different sort of way, I suppose. | ||
| There will be a little bit, but you know what? | ||
| I'm going to be trunched up in this thing. | ||
| You should see the way I'm seated. | ||
| This isn't like sitting in a chair. | ||
| I'm going to be laying on my back with my knees to my chest with these straps holding my legs compressed against me. | ||
| This is the way you go up in one of these. | ||
| You don't leave yourself open to flailing around at the cabin spins. | ||
| You don't want the g-forces to pin you in weird places. | ||
| This one thing I learned when I put on a Russian spacesuit and sat in one of the chairs from the Soyuz capsule. | ||
| Once you get in there and strap, when you're sitting in the seat, they put these fabric cuffs over your knees with straps that strap you down to it. | ||
| So you may not actually enjoy the weightlessness of it. | ||
| I will not enjoy the weightlessness of it. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Listen, Brian, I could go on, well, we have all night long, virtually. | ||
| What a blast. | ||
| I want to get you on the air one more time before you go. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| And I will definitely be there, and I will definitely contact somebody at Moody Blues for you. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, hey, man, that'd be fantastic. | |
| I want Ramona to come too, too. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You've got that. | ||
| She'll be there. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Good night. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| Brian Walker. |
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