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March 27, 2002 - Art Bell
02:45:14
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - The Rocket Guy - Brian Walker
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Time Text
Welcome to Arkbells Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from March 27th, 2002.
And the great American Southwest.
Everybody out there, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in Earth's 24 time zones.
Covered by this program, which is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
It's going to be a weighty program in more ways than one.
There are some things I'm going to hold off here a few minutes telling you about.
For important reasons.
I'm waiting for this article to arrive on my website so that I can talk about it.
I don't feel I should until you can make it up there and read it for yourself.
Now let's check national news.
Storming into a hotel dining room, a suicide bomber killed at least 19 Israelis and injured 120 others when he detonated explosives Wednesday night.
Just as a meal was beginning at a Jewish Passover celebration.
It's never going to end.
Is it?
Or is it going to be all of it?
Is it going to be the end?
Is the right question to ask about everything that's happening over there right now.
President Bush signed legislation Wednesday designed to limit the role of big money in political campaigns, triggering A rush to the courthouse by critics challenging the constitutionality of the law.
I told you this would happen.
God, they didn't even wait an hour.
The president said I wouldn't have signed it if I was really unhappy with it.
Soon afterward, two lawsuits were filed against the legislation in the U.S.
District Courthouse, the suits brought by the NRA and Another by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky alleged the new law violates free speech, so they're going to send this one straight to the court without passing go.
Milton Berle, the acerbic cigar-smoking vaudevillian who eagerly embraced the new medium and became Mr. Television, has died at 93.
He was diagnosed with colon cancer last year.
So, a legend is surely gone, Milton Berle.
I remember as a child, you know, vague memories.
I remember my dad brought home a television and it was about a 7-inch screen.
I know because I later got this TV, you know, from my room.
It was this giant cabinet with this little tiny 7-inch screen, but everybody in the neighborhood came running over to see Bell's television, you know.
And we had a full living room every night for a long time.
That was the beginning of TV, and so was Milton Berle.
And that's where you saw him, and he's gone now.
A good trip, my friend.
A court convicted a U.S.
airman Thursday of raping a Japanese woman, sentenced him to 32 months, including a case that deepened resentment toward American troops stationed in Okinawa.
So, a conviction there.
American Airlines pilots have told the government that it should consider grounding the Airbus A300-600, one of which crashed in New York last year because of safety questions.
American Airlines and Airbus Industries say the plane is safe.
the FAA has ordered new inspections of the Airbus A300-600 but has not yet
grounded the aircraft. Now as you know on my website this is it just gets nothing
but more interesting by the moment.
The man who built the Coral Castle, I've seen years of info on this man and talked to many people who have been there, but the other night, John in Orlando, Florida, blew me away, blew me away, sent me a picture of an obviously, some sort of magnetic machine That the man who built this... I mean, it's the American equivalent of the pyramids.
It's impossible.
What this man did, by himself, small man by the way, impossible.
Totally, utterly, absolutely impossible.
He could never have moved the rocks around.
As we are curious about the pyramids, we are curious about Coral Castle.
And inside of the Coral Castle, here is this rare picture of this machine Which, I say again, looks like something out of Stargate.
And I've been talking about it the last couple of days since I got the photo.
Now, I think you'll find this of some interest.
My very good friend, Woodley Streber, wrote to Bill Mello, who is a scientist, and asked him to look at the photograph that I put up on my website.
And William Mallow wrote back the following.
The structure seems to have the usual rotor and stator components that all motors contain, but, in capital letters with exclamation points, there is the impression of resonance slash harmonics involved, which vary as the rotor seems designed to turn at varied vertical orientations.
and strikes varied shaped relief patterns around the inner surface.
There appears to be a handle for manual rotation and a somewhat eccentric inner surface.
Each of the relief symbols or bells corresponds to one of the external rectangular bar-like stator-like composite structures.
Tuning may be implicit The construction of the bars around the assembly together with the elevation and shape of the relief bells or sounding pins slash pegs to design and construct a machine that rings and sings at acoustically powerful enough levels to lift and place megalithic objects requires an understanding of mechanics, physics, and harmonics that are reminiscent of John Keeley.
The 19th century inventor who uncovered some universal laws of matter, force, sound, that still baffle us.
And that is what Bill Mallow wrote back to Uly Streber, who then passed it on to me in email about this photograph.
I'm telling you, it's incredible.
So if you haven't been to my website yet to see it, please do.
It is without question a magnetic The gentleman, now I get a lot of email.
Now, why is it important?
Well, because it's right in the middle of Coral Castle.
That's why.
It's right in the middle of Coral Castle.
Now, the gentleman...
Now, I get a lot of e-mail.
I get so much e-mail.
I'm awaiting an answer from the man who called last night and said that any hole in excess
of 10,000 feet drilled into the earth is a matter of national security and is secret,
highly secret.
And he had the answer, and he was going to give it to me, but said it could hurt the
so I said no.
Send it to me in email.
Well, Harold, I have not received your email yet.
If you would, he's a ham, so if you would please put your call letters, Harold, in the subject line.
And send it to me again, A-S-A-P.
I would certainly appreciate it, because a lot of people want the answer to that, me included.
I could have missed it.
You know, I just, I get reams of email.
Okay.
The two things that I additionally want to talk to you about that are going on the website have just now gone on.
I'm going to bring them up with great trepidation and hesitation, particularly in view of the second one.
The first one is a very interesting.
When you go to Artbell.com, here's what you do.
You click on what's new, and instead of going down, you go up to where it says updated news and other websites.
And the first is a very interesting picture.
It's titled Uh, baby with tail, reincarnation of Hindu God, and though the photograph has been around for a while, this is a photograph, folks, a very clear, very clear photograph of a child with a tail.
A pretty good sized tail at that.
You know, we were talking about people with tails the other day, remember that?
Well, here is one with a tail.
That is the first item.
The second item, I'm going to have to talk to you about.
I am not going to withhold news from you.
As you know, a lot of news breaks first in the United Kingdom, and for some reason they're more on top of a lot of, I don't know, the kind of stories that I cover here, than The press in this country, but I am told that this is going to break in the press in this country.
That may or may not be.
There has been published in the London Observer, Sunday, March 17th, an article that I consider extremely, you know, personally I consider this extremely defamatory to The Memory of Father Malachi Martin.
It's a rather long, involved article.
It's entitled, Condemned to a Life in Purgatory for Falling Prey to a Sinner in the Vatican.
And it says some pretty horrible things about Father Malachi Martin.
So, here's the way I'm going to treat it.
Right now I'm going to just Put a link to the Guardian website article on my website.
It's up there now.
I think the link is second one down.
It's called Condemned to a Life in Purgatory for Falling Prey to a Sinner in the Vatican.
Click on that.
It will take you across the pond and you can read the article.
And you can decide for yourself.
Now, Father Malachi Martin is no longer around, of course, to defend himself.
And you may wish to give no weight whatsoever to this article.
It's awful.
Awful.
So anyway, with regard to the first photograph of the child with a tail and this awful article about Malachi Martin, just click on What's New and go up, not down, to where it says News and Other Websites and there will be the information I'm talking about right now.
And I'm not even going to, at this point, honor this article in any way by reading any of it to you on the air.
It's a rather extensive article.
The bad part's really coming more toward the end.
Oh, boy.
So they're not, you know, you're not even done here on Earth when you're done.
I mean, they're just going to come after you after you're gone.
That probably happens to most people of some public, you know, some public exposure.
so somebody who's very much in the public eye, even after they're gone, anything that
would appear to be like a terrible scandal will still break and will still make news.
You've seen this awful black water down in Florida, right?
Getting a lot of news stories about it now.
And this black water, this incredible black water, now it's not killing life.
We don't think it's actually killing life.
It covers a large part of the ocean down there off Florida.
It's not actually, it doesn't seem to be killing life, but it is devoid of life.
Now that may mean that the life just took off and went elsewhere, but we're beginning to get some First trickling of information about what they think it might be.
Just trickling in, right?
But these samples might be indicating that there is some sort of algae bloom.
They're not really sure yet.
You know, they're looking into reasons for the phenomena.
And I've got a number of quotes from scientists here.
Let's see.
We have certain expectations about the number of bacteria in normal coastal ocean water.
Good, clean ocean water has between one and three million bacteria.
Elevated levels would be in the area of ten times that.
Researchers from NOAA weren't aware of the phenomena at the time they were sampling between Key West and There are a lot of surprising results.
at Hogg Florida's southwest coast they collected in areas on the fringe and the core of the
water according to later reports from fishermen.
Brand refused to speculate on what his findings might mean but said the samples had an odd
array of organisms including green algae that is not normally found in Gulf water.
There are a lot of surprising results people would not have expected said Brand.
Generally you see green algae only under polluted conditions.
So that's kind of where that story stands right now in other words they just don't know.
The water has indications of large amounts of plant plankton.
And no evidence of red tide, so this one is a new and weird mystery.
In a moment, there will be more.
There sure have been a lot of people involved in microbiology dying lately, and here is another one.
Castle Rock.
Denver car dealer Kent Rickenbaugh, his wife Caroline, and their son Bart Were killed Sunday in a plane crash near Centennial Airport.
Pilot Dr. Steven Mostow also died.
Kent Rickenbaugh, 64, owned two car dealerships in the Denver area.
Caroline Rickenbaugh, 62, known for her involvement in the community.
Bart Rickenbaugh, 35, lived in Bozeman, Montana.
Mostow, that's M-O-S-T-O-W, 63, He was one of the country's leading infectious disease experts, and was Associate Dean at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
Amasto was a crusader for better health, an early advocate for widespread flu vaccinations, and more recently an expert on the threat of bioterrorism.
He was a champion for rural health care and childhood immunizations for the past three years.
He'd been helping to expand the Health Fair, a program that benefits thousands of people in Colorado.
The key here, though, is that he dealt in the exact areas that... I mean, he was working on bioterrorism.
And there have been, without question, A disproportionate number of scientists out there working in this field who have been dying in, I don't know, unusual ways.
I mean, I don't know if you say a plane crash is an unusual way to die, but in a way it is.
And this list is beginning to get to be very long, and a lot of people are beginning to notice So, it's like this is beginning to get noticed, folks.
It's all over the Internet.
It's not just me.
So, if there's something going on out there, why, uh, the media is beginning to notice, folks.
We do live in strange times.
I understand there's a warning to Americans around Easter in Italy.
Mona was just telling me she saw a newsflash about there possibly being danger to Americans in Italy around Easter.
figures, huh?
There's a lot of bad people in the world You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27th, 2002.
Tell me, tell me, tell me lies Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies Tell me lies, tell me lies Oh, no, no, you can't disguise Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies
And though I'm not making friends I hope that you understand there's a reason why
Close your eyes The strength of an ark roots deep in the ground
you 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.
To have all these things in our memories home.
And they use them to help us survive.
I'm out of here.
Why?
Why does your soul take its place on this trip just for me?
Why?
Ride, ride where she's sold, take his place, on this trip, just for one year
Ride, take a free ride, take the place, I've gotta see, it's not free
I've worked like a slave for years, sweat so hard just to win my fears
Had to win my life for all I had, but by now, I know, I should be proud
Ride, on the freeway, freeway, freeway, freeway, freeway Ride, on the freeway
I'm listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time, the night featuring a replay of Coast to Coast
AM from March 27, 2002. Again, I will call your attention to these so that you might
assess them yourselves. There is what I consider to be a very defamatory article about Father
Malachi Martin. You can get to it by going to my website, clicking up on news and other
websites and then have a read yourself and see what you think.
you You have to wonder why only after his death would an article of this sort be printed.
At the top of the hour, it's going to be very interesting.
You may remember the rocket guy, Brian Walker, who plans to launch himself 30 miles straight up in a rocket of his own design.
And, of course, we've got photographs of that rocket.
We're going to get an update because we're getting close to what was the first launch date.
Now, I think that may be pushback.
I'm not sure.
We'll ask.
A little bit, but it's getting very, very close, and I'm going to go up there and watch this launch.
There is no question about it.
We're going to open lines here in a second, but just very quickly from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Make way for the ultimate high-rise project, the Space Elevator.
Here we go again.
Long viewed as science fiction, Imagineering.
Researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality.
Still, the mental picture needed to grasp the elevator to space idea, well, you can't be weak of mind.
Forget the war of rocketry and those bone-jarring liftoffs like Rocketman's going to experience.
The elevator would be a nice, smooth, 62,000 mile ride up a long cable Payloads can shimmy up the Earth to space cable, experiencing no launch forces whatsoever, slowly climbing from one atmosphere right straight up into a vacuum.
Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids, and all beyond are routinely accessible via the space elevator.
And for all its promise and grandeur, this megaproject is made practical by the tiniest of technologies now, Carbon nanotubes.
Seen as an engineering undertaking for the opening decades of the 21st century, the Space Elevator Proposal was highlighted here during the 2002 Space and Robotics Convention held March 17th through the 21st, sponsored by the Aerospace Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Well, well, well, well, well, think about that.
They're really serious about this.
An actual, an actual elevator that would go from Earth, from ground, into space, and would take you there slowly, without any rockets or anything else.
These people are saying... These people are saying it really could be.
Now, how it... You know, the engineering of that, and the physics behind that, totally escape me.
But the concept is absolutely incredible!
Take an elevator to space!
I remember the Empire State Building.
I've been up in that elevator enough times, and that's a thrill.
But my gosh almighty!
62,000 miles!
Yay, yay, yay!
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Didn't someone once sing about a highway to heaven?
He's a stairway to heaven, yeah.
Art, greetings from the nation's first capital.
Uh, New York, eh?
Big Apple, New York City.
Yes, sir.
If General George Washington was around, he would say, boys, when the smoke clears, we're gonna be in the oil business.
You know, it's no longer an immigration issue, it's a national security issue.
The illegal invaders must be deported.
You know, Art, Flight 587 that crashed into Rockaway, New York, there are witnesses who saw that jet blow up, and those witnesses All have the same account.
They saw a small explosion by the wing, followed by a big explosion.
I could not agree more with you that somehow I don't feel like we've been told the whole story on that aircraft.
Right.
Not at all.
You're right.
And the government will say, well, it doesn't look like terrorism.
But look, anybody with any common sense knows that until a full investigation takes place, you don't know What exactly happened?
So you can't say either way.
But if they're trying to put this out that it wasn't terrorism, because obviously they don't want the airline, commercial airline industry to be shut down.
Look, the commercial airline, you know, as a result of this 9-11 thing, the U.S.
Postal Service is suffering horrendously.
Of course, what occurred there in New York and all the repercussions of that to our entire economy And, you know, the whole thing is strictly a national security issue, so I can't sit here and tell you that if I were sitting around some big oak table with a bunch of intel-type guys and we were deciding what to do, even, let's just, you know, for the sake of discussion, say it was, they know absolutely it was terrorism.
I'm not sure the right thing for national security would be to say so.
What do you think?
I think you've got to come clean with the American people, because then you're putting other people at risk.
Look at the sneak bomber.
Is that what America's come to, where we have three flight attendants fighting with that lunatic on that jet coming from France, even though the day before they threw him off the jet, if you remember?
The whole thing is madness.
But, but, but, but, listen to me now, and I'm going to say this again.
You know, even though I'm like everybody else, I want to know, I sure as hell want to know what the truth is, I also see the other side of it.
If you were trying to act in the best interest of our nation, and you had already observed the horrendous impact on the economy in this country from 9-11, the psyche of the American people because of 9-11, the worldwide repercussions because of 9-11, the war because of 9-11, in other words, these are World-shaking events, and the American people were beginning to get frightened.
Kind of a combination of first shock, then I guess anger and fright.
And so would you pile on, if you knew something had been a terrorist action, and you didn't have to say so, would you pile on?
And would you slam the economy harder and scare the you know what out of everybody or would you
perhaps hold that information close to your chest until you had irrefutable
evidence or even if you had a year irrefutable evidence there might be a national security issue there
a wildcard liner on the air hello yes uh... i was listening to program last night and uh... i
just think we're getting up uh... totally monolithic goes one-sided view of
uh... uh... post nine eleven events and uh...
there's former c i officials alike uh... broke the gate david mcmichael and
others who got so disgusted with the kind of propaganda they were
ordered to have other superiors to plant in various media outlets to frame
up various countries were attacked at the they left the agency and set
up a magazine like a covert action
And I think we're being subjected to the same type of thing.
Listening last night, I couldn't believe the kindergarten simplistic Actually, sir, listen to me.
He's not really ultra-right at all.
Not ultra-right at all.
and if we consider the uh... the uh... manipulations towards actually sir uh...
actually sir listen to me he's not really ultra right at all
not all to write all is just that uh...
uh... what he believes about of the god part of the brain
and then now apparently our self-destructive uh...
a wiring uh... he is you know he is very i i told him right on the
air is very narrow-minded He is very narrow-minded, and he is nevertheless, for me, very intellectually stimulating in terms of getting into it with him, and I really enjoy that.
I think he's dead wrong on a couple of things, and maybe right on a couple of others, and so do other very well-educated people like Professor Kaku.
I think he's a very interesting person.
And he is!
Stubborn, single-minded, macro-minded even, but extremely interesting to intellectually spar with.
No question about that.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
I don't know if you pushed the button.
Now you're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah, I'm Ethan.
I'm from Kentucky.
Yes, Ethan.
First thing I wanted to tell you is, Well, I have something for you.
My granduncle, he claimed that he had alien abductions multiple times in his life, and he passed away a few weeks ago, and he left me.
I inherited something from him that I'd rather tell you off the line later.
Well, everybody's always wanting to tell me offline.
Just give me a general description right here, would you please?
I try to keep everything as much as I'm able out in front of the audience, you know?
Smoking gun evidence of JFK shot.
Well, uh, we know that JFK was shot, sir.
No, but it's a different view.
It shows the driver.
Uh, yeah, this has been going around for a long time.
The driver turning around and shooting the president, is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
Man, that's real old stuff, sir.
Real, real old stuff.
Well, okay, well, the other thing I wanted to talk about was, I had a question I wanted to ask you.
I've heard about it.
I've heard it's supposedly a comet.
I've heard it's a planet.
I've heard it's a brown dwarf.
I've heard it's supposed to come anywhere from five years to next year.
I've tried to do research on it.
I found all these different things.
I wanted to know what you knew about it.
Has it been caught on telescope?
Yeah.
I mean, there's a big abcnews.com story.
Which I've had on the website forever now about something out there that does indeed look like it could be either a dead 10th planet or even a sort of a dead sun.
So the answer to your question is yes, there's a great deal of information out there about the possibility of a 10th planet that would seem to coincide with what a lot of people like Sitchin and Hazelwood and others are saying.
We're just mainstream backing for it, but we don't know much beyond that right now.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, Art.
How are you doing?
I'm doing okay.
This is Steve from Tucson.
Yes, Steve.
Yeah, well, I'm going to get to my point in a second, but regarding that 10th planet you were just talking about, I'm an astronomer.
You wouldn't happen to have any declination or... No, I absolutely would not.
No.
When you get them, please put them on the air.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
The main reason I called, and I don't know how to start, last night I was coming home from Phoenix with a buddy of mine.
Right.
And it's about one o'clock in the morning, and I'm, you know, I listen to your show a lot, and I hear all the people call and talk about UFOs and all this.
Right.
I thought I saw something maybe five years ago, but I didn't know what it was.
But this last night, I was coming down I-10, right down... Sounds like your world view changed last night.
Yeah, me and my friends.
Yes.
We were coming down I-10 at about milepost 178.
There was a object in the field to the right of us, to the west of the freeway.
Yes.
It was flying above the field, maybe at an altitude of about 10 feet.
I mean, I'm surprised it wasn't mowing down saguaro cactus.
It was so low.
Wow.
There was, and it was coming towards the highway.
Well, describe the object.
Triangular.
Oh.
Three very bright white lights on the bottom.
Really?
And how big, roughly, would you guess?
Well, when it almost hit us coming across the highway, this is the strange part, it was coming towards the highway, flying very low over this field, and it went actually over I-10 as it was banking back towards the field.
And that's when I caught a full bottom view of it.
And got all three of those bright lights right in my face, and then it went right back into the field.
I hit the brakes in my truck.
I thought I was going to hit it.
It was that close.
All right, now, pause, take a deep breath, and try and tell me again how big this object was.
Judging by the spacing of the lights, there was about 30 feet between the lights, and the object itself wasn't much bigger than its light spread.
It was very thin.
Um, it made absolutely no noise.
I'm an aircraft mechanic.
Sir, I have seen almost exactly what you are describing flew right over my head.
Well, this thing almost, I had to hit the brakes so I wouldn't hit it with my truck.
It made a 10 foot over the freeway pass as it was turning back towards the field it came from.
At which point I slammed on the brakes, pulled off the side of the road.
I know it was at milepost 178 because I happen to park right next to it.
And how many of you saw this?
Well, me and my friend.
And then right afterwards, somebody else we don't know pulled up past our car and pulled off the side of the road and they got out and they were watching it.
Right.
And so I wasn't the only one.
And it was one o'clock in the morning.
There's hardly anybody on the freeway.
To whom have you reported this?
Just my immediate friends and family.
And they all believe me, you know, because I don't walk around telling crazy stories.
Oh, I believe you.
I'm just suggesting that you should pursue this now and report it.
Okay.
There are any number of reporting agencies you can go to.
Well, I have a theory.
Basically, when we were watching this thing, it looked like it was searching for something in that field.
It was flying very, very low and slow.
And at one point, it looked like about a half a mile out, it landed.
About 15 seconds later, it took off almost straight up.
Made absolutely no sound.
Now, I used to be an airplane mechanic.
I know the sound of props.
I know the sound of helicopter blades.
I know the sound of the quiet military helicopters.
I know the sound of engines.
There was nothing.
I mean nothing, and I was close.
It's to the point where I would have heard this thing.
I had the same experience, sir.
It came straight over my head.
And it was the weirdest thing, at which point it was searching us.
We watched it for a good ten minutes.
Yeah.
And then it took, after it went straight up, it flew, and it was moving pretty quick, and then stopped.
It started heading back towards right at my van.
at which point my friend and we were just in there looking maybe at that point
it had noticed that you were there as witnesses well i would jump up and down waving at it at which point
it stopped again really turned around and went the other direction i see
uh... i know it sounds not i don't know that i would have been waiting to uh... i mean
do you know what Never mind.
I was at the point of, you know, I've been an astronomer all my life.
I love everything astronomical.
All right, listen, sir, I've got to take a quick break.
That's a pretty doggone good story.
Write it to me in the email and get hold of your friends so you can verify and by all means notify the authorities.
And there are any number of notification agencies that I've had on the air here.
many of them will be right the almost missed that commercial break in early
I get so involved in what I'm doing.
This article on Malachi tonight threw me for such a loop that just even talking about it and the rest of it and you just forget about doing a commercial break.
That's really bad for commercial radio.
You have to do your commercial breaks.
So I damn near blew it.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah, Art.
Hello.
Hey, this is Ken.
I remember Ken and Sherry.
We were on your show one night about the Haunted House.
Oh, yes, I do, of course.
Yes.
I'm going to get those pictures to you.
A guy was checking them out, and apparently they're not so much like ghosts, but demons.
Well, ghosts, sir, that's just a word, you know.
Right, right.
It's just a word.
We really don't know what these things are.
Well, why do you say demons?
I mean, what is it about the photographs that would say more demon?
The teeth.
Did you say teeth?
Yeah.
Give me a mental picture.
What do you mean the teeth?
What do they look like?
Well, there's like this face that's It's got like it's grimacing it's teeth at you in the first picture that I took and then in the second one.
Oh see now I really want these pictures.
Yeah it's the mouth is open and you can see like this whole row of teeth down.
Okay sold, sold, sold, sold.
Send me the photographs.
Yes I'm going to get those to you but uh one of the reasons I was calling was I wanted to hear more about that uh... soundtrack that you played the other night about the
guys that drilled all the uh... the whole to siberia yes for those who are
very well on
and there's not there's not much more to say or tell i mean if you know
what i tell you they drove all the lower the mics uh... it was a reuters news
you know mainstream story uh... and then i got the the file and you heard me play it
What more is there to say?
I really wish I could bring a guest on and talk about this, and if there's anybody who knows about this, I will sure have them on.
How's that?
That would be good.
I'd love to hear that again.
Oh, you want to hear it again?
Well, we'll get around to it, I'm sure.
The Rocket Man.
But he left me much too soon, his ladybird.
is going to launch himself 30 miles straight up.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27, 2002.
But he left me much too soon, his ladybird.
He left his ladybird.
Ladybird, come on down.
I'm here waiting on the ground.
Lady Bird, I'll treat you good.
Lady Bird, I'll treat you good, ah, Lady Bird, I wish you would, you Lady Bird...
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
So come on, let's dance together, you and I Oh, we can fly
Up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon The world's a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
The world's a nicer place in my beautiful balloon We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
Oh, we can fly Up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Suspended under the twilight canopy We'll raise our hands for the star to guide us
Here he comes.
What this man is about to do is gonna blow your mind.
We've got photographs to back it up, too.
We call him Rocket Guy, aka Brian Walker.
Well, somewhere in time.
The night's program originally aired March 27, 2002.
Here he comes.
What this man is about to do is going to blow your mind.
We've got photographs to back it up, too.
We call him Rocket Guy, aka Brian Walker.
And he is going to launch himself 30 miles straight up in a rocket of his own construction.
He calls the Notion Project RUSH.
R-U-S-H.
An acronym for a Rapid Up Super High.
That's what... Rapid Up Super High.
There are no plans for orbit.
Just to set the altitude record for a private citizen walker.
...is an inventor whose successful toy designs include the Air Bazooka, the Celestial Seeker, the Alien Orbiter.
Long before Project Rush, RocketGuy was developing ideas and inventions both practical and amazing.
Now, we had RocketGuy on one time previously, and he indicated that he had plans to launch in the spring.
Probably about now, actually.
So, that's why we're having him back right now.
I said I would go up and I would watch the launch and attend the launch, and I'm absolutely going to do that.
I know a lot of you will not have heard the first program, so we'll sort of fill you in.
We've got these wonderful new photographs on the website tonight of the rocket nozzle and various parts of the engine, and obviously he's made a stupendous amount of progress Just a stupendous amount of progress in what he's done.
And so all of this is well documented on the website.
This man is going to launch himself.
it's an incredible story and it's coming right up alright here is brian walker a.k.a. ronald
Rocket Guy.
Brian, welcome back to the program.
Thanks, Mark.
Nice to be here.
How long ago did we do the interview?
Last May, so just short, just under a year ago.
Just under a year.
And if I recall, if I recall correctly, you were planning on launching in the spring.
I think it was May.
Yes, I was hoping to launch this May.
And just as a quick update, I'm not going to make that launch with the full-size rocket.
There's been a lot of things that have been going on.
This project has gotten increasingly more complex as time goes on.
I actually had never really established a launch date.
It was kind of, maybe May, I remember that.
Yeah, and it was more than anything else driven by the fact that ever since I went public with this just about two years ago, the amount of interest in media has just been so overwhelming that not only has that taken a lot of time, but a lot of, there's been literally tens of thousands of people that have inquired about wanting to come see the launch.
and so i tried to have a data with the kind of a piece of that and it's just that this is
not the kind of project i can work around looking at it even as i have lots
of delays yeah and it's not a good about it one man a project that you've got
to have us right and uh... if there's any concern and that's causing a delay
why uh...
and i would have to take one second put off again again and again uh... brian
so you know you know i mean it's your but it's not good
uh... now some people obviously will not have heard the you know the first
program that we did together so we need to do a brief recap
What exactly are your plans?
Okay, well just a real quick summary of what's going on.
You know, when I was six years old, that was my first earliest memories of watching the space program.
I'm 45 now, and that was at the very beginning.
And like a lot of the kids in that day, I wanted to be an astronaut, but by the time I was about nine, I'd kind of concluded I just wasn't cut out for the You didn't have all the right stuff.
I didn't have all the right stuff.
Looking back at the original Mercury 7 and what was required, some kind of gut instinct
told me I was not going to get into space that way.
So I had basically a childhood dream that I would someday grow up and build my own rocket.
That was always in the back of my mind, although I think for most of my life it never seemed
a reality I would approach.
Ten years ago I began to start experiencing success as an inventor.
This dream kind of reemerged and since it had never been done yet I started looking
into what the possibilities were and would it really be possible to do this.
I've set a goal of attempting to make a flight straight up.
It's not an orbital flight I'm not going to reach orbital altitude or orbital velocity.
Yeah, but 30 miles you're going up 30 miles, right?
Yeah, 30 miles. That's that's a that's really up. It's way up last April
I flew in a mig-25 in Moscow and that was at 80,000 feet Which is about half that high and that's high
All right, well, so you must have made a fair amount of money with your inventions to be able to go flying about MIGs in Russia and to be undertaking the kind of project you're undertaking here.
Would that be fair to say?
Yeah, that's fair to say.
So your inventions were good.
Yeah, I've got a number of toys that are doing very well.
One in particular that's become a big, big hit at the Disney Parks and stuff.
That's just an amazing success in that product.
And, of course, I am basically trying to fulfill a dream and one of the biggest benefits, if not the biggest benefit, of the media attention I've had has been self-motivation on a project like this can be extremely difficult because there are times when I see this project in its whole entirety and I just kind of shake my head like, what am I doing?
This is just too big.
But the amount of emails I've had from people and the support and the interest that this I've done a whole lot to help, you know, get over those hurdles.
You know there's a chance you're going to kill yourself, right?
Well, I'll tell you, I really, I won't launch in this thing if I have a feeling that I will not at least escape, you know, my number one mission is survivability and number two is success.
Yeah, I understand, but even with all the, you know, precautions that And at NASA takes, I mean, people die.
That's true.
And what I've done, of course, is one of the things, one of the reasons I've had some delays is, number one, I decided last summer, late summer, first thing that happened is I ran out of room and I had to put up another building.
I just didn't have the interior space anymore.
My shop is where I build all the components.
And that means a lot of fiberglass work and messy, you know, dust and constantly building pieces.
I needed a place to actually assemble it.
So I put up a 45-foot diameter geodesic dome, and that serves as the assembly building.
It's 27 feet at the highest point in sight, so I can actually work on the rocket standing vertically.
On that project, of course, I started, believe it or not, that building began to go up on September 11th.
September 11th?
September 11th was the day the work crew came up to put the kit up, and you know, like everyone else, I went through several months of just Yeah.
you know, kind of a bleak, not knowing what, you know, I was spending so much time and
money on this project and, you know, the whole situation in the world was such that there
were times when I was ready to give up on it, just not knowing.
And the dome took six months to get to the point where now it's ready to be used.
All right, before we proceed, let me ask you, what would you say now is your projected date
Okay, well, what I've done is I've gone kind of backed up a bit and I've been working on a rocket that's one-half the size, carries about one-twentieth the fuel load, and the rocket itself is one-half size.
I basically wanted to test the features that I'm planning to use on the full-size rocket.
This test rocket is designed to go to about 15,000 feet.
And it's on a mobile launcher.
It's a 16-foot trailer, and it uses an air catapult to actually initiate the launch.
It'll accelerate the rocket to 30 miles an hour in 8 feet, and that gives me immediate stability.
I'm going to be doing test launches on that late spring, early summer, and my goal is to do three test launches on the empty, and then ride it up the fourth time.
To an altitude of 15,000 feet, and then I'll skydive from it.
I won't come down in the rocket, I'll come out of the rocket.
And skydive back to Earth?
Right.
Wait a minute, how high again?
15,000 feet.
And from there you'll literally sort of jump out?
Right, the capsule that I'm in, and the pictures of this, some of the pictures you have on your website show the rocket body of this.
The capsule is one in which I'm not quite standing, not quite squatting inside.
There's a full-length door that opens up and basically the panel pops off.
The rocket will go up and then there's a nose cone that comes off and a 26-foot parachute will come out.
And then as soon as that parachute comes out, the panel pops open and I'll come out and I'll just do what would be a normal typical skydive.
Alright, I recommend now to all of my audience who have already not gone to the website,
the best way to understand how serious this man is and how far he's gone is to look through
the photographs he has provided under program tonight's guest info.
Please go to Brian Walker, click on the new projects and go through those photographs,
and then click at the bottom on previous photos, go through the entire, you'll see the entire
rocket, you will see, absolutely, you'll see the whole rocket compound from the air, you'll
see the craft, the capsule, you'll see the whole thing, everything is laid out for you,
and you will realize just how serious or crazy.
Depending on your point of view, the man you're listening to right now really is, but he certainly is extremely serious.
All the hardware is here.
I'm curious, Brian, how much have you spent so far?
Oh, I've probably got right now probably around $350,000 worth.
Well, a good deal of that has been in the infrastructure.
Building the rocket is one thing, but it's setting up all the buildings, the shop, the equipment, the tools, the jigs.
For instance, I built the centrifuge and I finally got that operational last November, just about time to wrap it up for winter.
And that's so I can get used to the G-forces.
Have you been in your centrifuge?
I've been in it to 3 G's.
I've had it run empty up to 8 and a half G's.
I've been in it only to 3 because that's when the weather, by the time it was ready to start testing the weather turned and it was just time to wrap it up.
How would you term going into the centrifuge at say 3 G's?
Does it begin to get uncomfortable?
Three G's consistently, the thing about centrifuges, as opposed to being in an aerobatic aircraft or even on carnival rides, the G's forces are consistent in one direction, so you're not feeling the nausea aspect of the vertigo from having your equilibrium slammed left.
Still, you weigh... You feel three times your weight, your chest gets heavy.
Now, in Russia, I've been up to, in the Russian centrifuge, I went up to eight G's, and at that point, you have to actually And what kind of G-forces are you going to pull in the launch?
Probably around 6 G's.
because if you lose that and they flatten out from the forces, you don't really have
any muscles for instance to open your throat back up and they have to immediately stop
it.
But 8 G's you're fighting to just kind of maintain at that point.
And what kind of G forces are you going to pull in the launch?
Probably around 6 G's.
Around 6 for what period?
Well, it'll be immediately at the launch.
There's a considerable slam because of the air catapult that launches it.
And then it'll moderate a little bit, and then for 90 seconds, on the full-size rocket, the motor runs for 90 seconds, and there'll be a consistent 6 to as many as high as 8 Gs.
And I know I can take that, because in Russia, when I did the... I did 6 Gs the first time I went.
When I went back last year, they took me to 8, and the doctor in charge of the centrifuge program said that Had I been training for a Soyuz launch, he would have OK'd me on the Centrifuge.
Really?
Really.
Which was very neat.
How much does it... You went up in a MiG what?
MiG-25.
MiG, oh my.
What does it cost to take a ride in a MiG-25?
About $11,000.
About $11,000.
You've now taken two?
No, I've only done the MiG once.
I went over in June of 2000, the first time to Russia, and I went with an expedition tour company that puts together exotic vacations.
And did a week cosmonaut training, um, a week long, not week, a week long cosmonaut training thing at the Star City and they took you in the centrifuge and we went up into zero gravity parabolic flight.
Did you happen to tell them while you were over there what your plans were?
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
They were, you know, of course the translator, they first looked at me and scratched their head and couldn't figure it out.
But when they started seeing the pictures of what I was doing, uh, they were very enthusiastic, very excited about it.
In fact, one of the really neat things was the fact that for most of these people that I met there, they'd never really had any contact with someone from our system, our capitalist, democratic, you know, society.
And for them to see one person approaching what is their pride, a one-man space program, was very, you know, it was mind-blowing to them that just because I come from a country that Give individuals the right to do whatever they want to do, basically.
That's another subject we're going to cover.
Yeah, it was an exciting time, and I've been back four times now.
So they didn't laugh real hard, or at least not in your view?
No, no, not at all.
In fact, when I was out, I went to one airbase when I was there last April.
I not only did the MiG-25, but I went and did a little L-39, which is a trainer jet.
When the commander of the base saw the article, they gave me one of their club patches and put my thing up on the wall, and they were very, very excited.
I didn't get any kind of ridicule at all.
Well, I would like to come up even to see your bailout at $15,000.
That's going to be a very significant event in and of itself, just because no No one's ever launched themself in a private rocket.
I mean, as far as... Uh-huh.
...either been in a Russian or American spacecraft that any human being has ever gone up in a rocket, whether it's, you know, 500 feet or 5,000 feet or 100 miles.
Are there any laws against your doing this?
Well, really the only thing is that, depending on where I launch from, I will need to get a waiver from the FAA to utilize that airspace.
And that makes absolute sense.
That's all?
I mean, in other words, you obviously issue a warning that aircraft shouldn't be in the area when you do what you're about to do, right?
Well, right.
It's not me issuing a warning.
I go to them.
It's like, for instance, Tripoli is a nationwide monologic organization that has choppers all over the U.S.
And when they're going to do one of their high-altitude launches, they notify the FAA?
Well, they don't only notify them, they actually have to apply for a permit, and the FAA will grant them a waiver.
I see, but that's as serious as it gets.
And they do routinely grant those waivers for rocket enthusiasts, right?
Sure, sure.
And those kind of rocket enthusiasts have to be licensed.
Well, they have to be members of a group.
I'm going to be basically just going for a simple waiver that says, look, you know... Now, they do have to be licensed.
They go through a testing procedure, I believe, don't they?
Well, it depends on what class of... But when you really get up there to where you're going to put some way up there, then you are required to get some kind of license, I think, right?
Sure.
And, well, yes.
You know what?
I'll tell you what.
I look at this project and I haven't got to that crossroad yet of having to deal with it.
There's so much involved in this project right now.
I do think that's true, though.
I have a number of model rocketry magazines, you know, and they talk about, in fact, they won't even sell rockets to people who have not been licensed at a certain class or something or another.
You know, it's kind of interesting.
I looked into it because I wanted a rocket.
I want a rocket for my front.
I was going to put a rocket on my front lawn.
I thought that it would send an interesting message to the community and my neighbors.
Sure.
Just to sort of have that rocket out there.
Never necessarily to launch it, but I mean, it would be very cool on the front lawn.
Well, and I can understand.
I mean, the whole point is that the government's got a very vested interest in making sure that... But listen, hold on.
We're at the bottom of the arrow.
Hold it right there.
You know I had to do this, right?
I mean, listen to the words.
Zero hour, nine a.m.
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27th 2002
It's lonely out in space On such a timeless flight And I think it's gonna be a long, long time Till touchdown
brings me round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home, no, no, no
Wow.
you And I'll never know
Mars ain't the kind of place To raise your kids
In fact, it's cold as hell And there's no one there
To raise them To feel
And all the science I don't understand
It's just my job to find days a week A rocket man
A rocket man I don't know how I think it's gonna be
You just had to play that, didn't I?
Right?
me around I get to find, a proper man I think I am at home.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27, 2002.
Just had to play that, didn't I? Right? Well...
Listen. Listen to me very closely.
Before you, just as a result of listening to what we're saying right here, dismiss this out of hand.
Don't do that.
Really, don't do that.
You've got to go to my website.
We have an array of, I think, oh, probably 20 or 30 photographs of the rocket complex, the complex in which all of this is being built, of the parts, of the craft itself, of the escape mechanism, the module, The nozzles, there's a lot of new photographs up there.
This is obviously an extremely serious, real effort.
So before you dismiss this for one second, you've got to go up there and take a look at the photographs.
That would be my first suggestion to you.
The man building all of this, the man who's going to ride atop it, ultimately to 30 miles above Earth, is on the line.
He's Brian Walker, and he'll be right back.
Once again, here's Brian Walker.
Brian, I get questions during the course of the show by computer.
Charlie in Edmonton, Alberta asks, has Rocket Guy ever skydived, even once?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I started taking... Actually, it's funny.
I made my first parachute jump in 1972 when I was 16.
Oh.
And that was in the days of old.
All they had was military surplus equipment.
And on my fourth static line jump, I climbed out of the airplane and I was ready to go.
And the instructor grabbed my shoulder and said, get back in the plane.
And the static line was actually wrapped around my arm.
Had I jumped, it probably would have been all over.
And I couldn't jump.
I had to get back in the plane.
He undid it.
I climbed back out.
But that was it.
My mind froze and I couldn't jump.
And it took me almost 20 years to face that fear and get up there and jump again.
Well, with that in mind and what you have in mind, how does all that square?
Basically, facing fear and getting past things.
Skydiving nowadays has become such a completely different activity than it was 20 years, 30 years ago.
The equipment is far more sophisticated, three times more reliable than the person jumping it.
And you know, it's just a matter of where you are in your head.
Okay, so you're now comfortable.
Oh yeah, yeah, completely.
Alright, the craft that you're going to launch, even your test rockets, are they going to be reusable?
Yes, that's one of the biggest, with this test rocket for instance, the biggest challenge I have is making sure that I can land it without destroying it or damaging it.
Right.
Because I want to be able to do several test launches to make sure that the systems all work.
Because it's worth a lot of money.
Oh yeah, definitely, definitely.
Uh, the way it's set up right now is there is, in fact, the pictures you have up on your site, the very first one shows me holding this big thing above my head.
Right.
That is the actual fuel cell which goes inside of the gray body where the fins are.
And that has a carbon fiber wound tank that holds 30 gallons of fuel.
Of what kind of fuel?
90% pure hydrogen peroxide.
The way this thing works, basically, is 90% pure peroxide, when it reacts with silver, is a very violent reaction that produces steam as it expands.
The old Bell rocket belt, which you've seen in James Bond and a million different places, that is the same type of fuel and the same type of motor.
So I've got this fuel tank.
It's a 30-gallon tank.
It's a 10-inch diameter, 8 feet long.
And then surrounding it every 90 degrees, there's a 4-inch diameter carbon fiber sleeve, which is 9 feet long.
And that whole assembly will fit over the pneumatic launcher, which is also seen there on the site.
There's four big blue tubes.
And what happens is that at 40 pounds of air pressure, that will deliver 2,000 pounds of lift.
So the moment the engine is initiated, the compressed air will actually It'll actually boost the whole rocket into the air, accelerating at 30 miles an hour and 8 feet, and that gives it its momentum, and it overcomes the fact that it's not sitting still, and it doesn't require the engine to overcome the dead weight.
So you're catapulting yourself, really?
Right.
If I had my way, I'd launch rockets a little bit differently than the way we've been doing it.
I would build giant Earth-based catapults that would accelerate the rocket, to a very high velocity before requiring use of its own fuel.
You know, you take a typical rocket, whether it's a space shuttle or a Saturn or whatever, and you watch those things when they launch, and by the time they're reaching, you know, several hundred feet in altitude and at high speeds, they've already used up an enormous amount of fuel.
Yeah, I've got you.
Which it had to carry in the first place.
It's like, if you had to climb a ten-mile ladder and figured it was going to take you a week to climb that
ladder, if you had to carry all your own fuel and water, you'd never be able to do it.
If you were being supplied your fuel, your water, and your food on your way up the ladder,
you'd be much lighter and you'd be able to do it much more efficiently.
I'm a big believer that putting things into space should not be done by lighting a fuse
and letting it start from scratch at a standstill and having to carry every single bit of its
Well, I would think then that the timely ignition of your rocket would be a Really critical item.
In other words, you don't want for one second begin falling or tumbling or doing something that's not sound when the engine does ignite.
Well, exactly.
What exactly will happen is it happens kind of simultaneously.
Fortunately, with this type of rocket, the ignition is a result of a chemical reaction.
And when the valve is opened up, the fuel tank is pressurized and the fuel is forced into the catalyst chamber under pressure.
There's one, basically, rotary ball joint, basically.
It opens up and it allows the fuel flow.
And the Rocket Belt, for instance, the Bell Rocket Belt, had thousands and thousands of flights with virtually never any problems because it's such a simple process.
It's not like trying to mix an oxidizer, liquid oxygen, and, you know, kerosene or alcohol, and control a combustion and a burn, where, you know, if you're off by several Several percentage points in your mixture, you could have an explosion or burnout.
This is opening up a valve and allowing the fuel to flow through.
So what'll happen is basically, as soon as that fuel valve opens up and the rocket engine reaches a certain point, that's when the compressed air launcher will release it.
So it won't be dependent upon one or the other.
They will operate basically simultaneously.
Alright, well you said now the test rockets you're going to be launching, which include you're getting on one of them, is going to be about half scale, right?
It's about half-size.
It's not a true scaled-down version because the full-size rocket is designed to carry 9,000 pounds of fuel.
Okay, so how are you going to fit into this smaller version?
Well, the capsule portion on top is 27-inch diameter, 6 1⁄2 feet tall, and the idea is that the door on it is virtually full-size as my body.
And I'll be wearing a complete skydiving rig with a regular parachute and emergency parachute.
What you just described, size-wise, is about a coffin.
Well, I don't particularly like that.
That may not be a good analogy.
It doesn't need to be.
It's like being in a phone booth.
It's like being in a phone booth.
Okay, we'll use phone booths.
And the thing is, I'll only be in it for Maybe 45 seconds.
45.
So there's no reason that... Adrenaline pumping seconds.
Yes, it'll be very, very much adrenaline.
But I'll tell you quite honestly, I look at this from the means by which I plan on launching it, by giving it momentum.
I'm also, I'm doing two things on this.
Not only am I using the compressor catapult to give it its actual momentum, but there's also the fin setup on this is set up to where The fins at launch are extremely large surface area, which means at low airspeed they are very effective because it's comparing holding a hand out the window of a car at 10 miles an hour versus 60 miles an hour.
Right.
And then holding a clipboard, you know, your hand at 10 miles an hour doesn't do much and at 60 you can climb.
But a clipboard, yeah.
You hold a clipboard out and at 60 miles an hour you lose control of it if you turn it.
That's right.
So the fins on the rocket, there's four large fins that are there for the full length.
But when I launch, there's a section that actually doubles the surface of each fin.
It's like an overlay.
And so the moment the rocket comes off the launch at 30 miles an hour, the surface area of the fins are so large that it would actually take some other action to cause the rocket to not go straight.
Do you see what I'm saying?
I do.
And as soon as I reach a certain speed point, then there's basically a Ripcord style pin that pulls out, and those overlays are shed off the rocket.
And now, I'm not carrying the problem of, of course, the large fin is great at low speed, but when you get to a higher speed, it can induce instability.
So I'm losing those fins.
Now, on the full-size rocket, there'll actually be three fin sections.
And when I launch, the fin sections are about, each one's about the size of a sheet of plywood.
So there's a very large aerodynamic surface.
And when I reach 100 miles an hour and then again around 350 miles an hour, these sections come off, which finally trims it down to where the fin size at the when the permanent fin, the small fin, is trimmed for the rest of the flight.
Because of course, from that point on, I'll accelerate and the atmosphere gets thinner and thinner, of course.
So there's a kind of a curve where the speed and the density of the atmosphere And of course, then the rocket begins weather veining also,
where just the length and the size and the shape of the rocket causes it to want to point
straight.
Now also the main rocket, the full-sized rocket, it has eight 55-pound thrust rocket motors
in the nose, and what that does, that keeps it pointed straight.
Remember, I'm not trying to go to any specific location.
So guidance on this is not critical.
You're just trying to go up.
I just want to go straight.
That's the secret here.
I just want to go straight.
I don't want to go cartwheeling off.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of the NASA launched rockets cartwheel off, and you know, many, many, many rockets have cartwheeled off, and so you think this will prevent that eventuality?
Well, yeah, the three things, using the guided assistive launch, for instance, if you've ever launched a small model rocket, like a little Estes rocket or something, when you don't use the guide rod, and you just set it on the ground, it doesn't, you know, it'll cartwheel everywhere.
Yes, I've launched some number like that.
Very dangerous.
And when you put it on that little launch rod, if you give it a controlled distance to accelerate, that makes all the difference.
It's kind of like the difference between shooting a small pistol with a short barrel and a long rifle.
The greater distance you have to... That's true.
This way you have every possibility of destroying a house several blocks away.
Yeah.
Instead of your own.
There again, I plan on launching in an area that's so remote that if you figure the height... Okay, well that's the next question.
Where are you going to launch?
Well, actually, you know, there's a number of areas I've been looking at, but my favorite choice right now at this point, just because of its location and the vast size of it, is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where they do the Burning Man, and they do a lot of model rocket launches there also.
So that's such a vast area that other places I could launch there, and if you figure my highest point, no matter what would occur as far as drift and everything else, I would still not come down outside of a cone.
Right.
That would be in a certain direction.
In any direction I might go, I'm going to still come down within the confines of an area.
How much of a crew will you have with you?
In recovery, that kind of thing?
There'll be quite a good-sized crew.
I've had so many offers to do this as a live television event and people wanting to do all kinds of... Well, why not?
Well, that's it.
Why not?
I mean, that's going to... I think in many respects that with the number of people that want to show up to this launch, just trying to organize that kind of event alone It's half again as big of a project as this whole thing is.
I mean, I for example, I guarantee, Ramon and I will get in the RV, we'll come up there and we'll do a broadcast.
Oh yeah, we'll do a broadcast.
There's absolutely no question about it.
And I don't do those things, but I would do that.
Yeah, well I would be honored to have you do that.
But there again, I'd much rather turn over dealing with that aspect of this to someone that wants to cover that end of it.
As far as a crew, I've had so many people volunteer to want to do different things.
I've had people with experience in telemetry and all different aspects.
I'm doing, basically, the grunt work of building all the components, with the exception, for instance, of my rocket motors.
I have a guy in Florida that's been building my rocket motors because he's been doing peroxide rocket motors for 30 years.
Knows what he's doing.
Knows what he's doing, and I don't have, you know, it doesn't make any sense to me to invest in giant, huge metal lathes and stuff for that small portion.
In other words, why reinvent the wheel?
Exactly.
But I enjoy doing the building, for instance, the fuel tank setup.
That thing is, that's really, I enjoy doing that.
It's extremely laborious and time-consuming, and yet it's kind of a zen thing of getting out there and starting with these raw materials and turning out something.
That tank, I'm getting ready to do tests on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if that thing would be able to take 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of air pressure.
It only weighs 10 pounds.
Well, are you married?
No.
That's an interesting story, though.
I'm going to be soon.
You have a fiancé?
Yes, I met a woman in Russia.
In Russia?
In Russia.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
She's very wonderful.
She's my soul mate.
I have no doubt that we've spent three months of daily email correspondence, and when I went last April to fly the MiG, we had arranged a meeting, and from the moment we met... You saw stars.
Yeah, and she'd actually wanted to be a cosmonaut when she was a little girl and always dreamed of it.
So when she heard what I was doing, you know, she was just... So now you're sure she didn't fall in love with what you were doing more than you?
No, because once we'd actually met and I went and spent the first time... When I met her last April, I was there for two weeks.
I flew the MiG and she has a little boy who's eight.
He's just an absolutely wonderful little boy.
So you're going to be a father, too?
Yeah.
I'll tell you, it's funny.
I've never had real strong desires to have a family until the past couple of years.
Well, my point when I asked was, and still is, I mean, obviously she's going to be, I guess, supportive of what you're about to do, or does she have questions?
She's very supportive of it, and yet she has the fear that you might normally expect.
Yes.
I mean, here she is about to come all the way from Russia.
Yep.
And just to come over and see me go up in the fireball.
And I'll tell you quite honestly, that's been one of the reasons that I have kind of made some changes to this program.
Because before she came along, I was probably prone to be a little bit less... Well, you were ready to light the match.
Oh, I was ready to light the match.
Suddenly a wife and a child will cause you to further rethink the risk.
Well, again, that's why the test rocket is there.
And the test rocket has to perform the way I expect it to three times and then I'll go up in it.
If I have a feeling that it's not going to go well and I'm not going to survive the thing, I won't go in it.
And you're going to have a test amount of Brian Walker weight in the rocket, right?
Yeah, there'll be a Brian Walker test dummy.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I figured, well, I'd better not put an animal in there or I'll get peed after me.
I wouldn't impose that on an animal anyway.
Isn't that strange?
I mean, if you put an animal in a rocket, an organization comes after you.
Right.
If you as a human get in a rocket, it's cool.
They're there to lighten the match for you.
Yeah, they're lighting the match.
That's an interesting world we live in.
It really is.
So, Jay, when might your wife be coming to join you?
I'm hoping to go back over in May.
Oh, in May?
Oh, so... It's coming up.
It's coming up.
It's been actually a very interesting turn of events, the way things have all happened, because, you know, like I said, I'm 45 years old, and it was kind of unexpected that I I would find love at this point in my life, but that's what it is.
I don't know what else to say.
Hey, it strikes.
It strikes.
That's life.
She's just such a lovely woman, I just can't even begin to say it.
Is she about your age?
No, no, she's quite a bit younger.
She should be 29 in April.
29!
Well, I want to have a child of my own.
She wants to have another one, so it's imperative to find someone younger.
Wow!
Alright, well...
Boy, you have had a rich, full life here of late, haven't you?
Yeah, it's been interesting.
I mean, you know, I've been an inventor all my life, and it's been tough because, you know, I'm a dreamer.
I dream.
I see things.
I see things before I do them.
And then I've got to, it's kind of like if you go ahead in a time machine and see something, then you've got to come back and accomplish it.
You know what I mean.
Phillip in Hattiesburg, I guess Pennsylvania, asks Art, ask him why is he doing this?
And if it does work, how far will he go?
Well, we've covered that.
What will he do next?
And has he ever had treatment for this disorder?
You can hold your answer until after the break.
We're at the top of the hour.
Don't dismiss this.
Not for one second.
You go look at the photos.
Before you even call me tonight, you look at those photos.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27, 2002.
March 27, 2002.
March 28, 2002.
March 29, 2002.
March 30, 2002.
March 31, 2002.
March 31, 2002.
And this heart of mine, can't lie to you.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time, the night featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 27, 2002.
Brian Walker is my guest, Paul the Rocket Guy.
Tonight's qualification to be a caller is that you have seen the photographs on the website.
Go to my website, look at the photographs, because otherwise you just wouldn't believe.
You couldn't believe that he's really about to do what he's about to do.
You just wouldn't believe it.
So that's a qualification.
Go up there and take a look at the photographs first.
Once again, here is Brian Walker.
A.K.A.
Rocket Guy.
Brian, let's pick up where we left off.
Assuming that... I mean, what if all this works?
If your test rockets go fine, your first personal flight goes fine, even the big flight goes fine, what might you... would there be anything else, or would you then say, look, I have achieved my goal, I've made history, so I quit?
You know, I've given a lot of thought to that, and I think that there's a very good chance that that's probably where I'd be at.
I'm already getting really tired because I've been at this for so long.
And, you know, getting back to a couple of the questions that I asked, why am I doing this?
And, you know, I don't think I can sit and give you an absolute definitive exact answer other than the fact that there's a drive to do this that kind of propels me on.
Why?
I guess maybe it's a combination of the fact that I've always been totally intrigued by space and the idea of being able to travel in space has just been one of those things I've always wished I could do.
Secondly is the idea of approaching a project of this size and actually carrying through and doing it, kind of like completing a life doctorate.
you know this is kind of the thing that um you know just yeah i can respect that yes all right uh
The third thing, if I might just add this also, in the past 22 months I've had about 11 million hits on my website and probably about close to 10,000 emails.
The kind of emails I get from people, the majority of them are so incredible.
The amount of support and people telling me how the fact that I'm approaching this dream has given them the motivation to go after their dream.
And I'm beginning to see that there's something much bigger maybe here that I never really expected.
So there's a number of reasons that are driving me to do this.
Well, that also is pressure, though.
It is pressure.
It's a lot of pressure.
And that's one of the reasons that I was really happy to be able to get back on these shows, because I know that for every maybe two or three hundred emails I get that are great, positive, and wonderful, I'll get one, you know, that I've had some kind of, I've had some pretty ugly emails from people.
What kind of ugly?
Can I call you a lunatic?
Well, worse than that.
I mean, I've had some people that I think are just angry because, for some reason, I don't know.
You know, like I said, fortunately, there are very, very few and far between.
I get some people that originally would say, well, you know, you're nuts or whatever, and I can deal with that.
But you said anger.
That's interesting.
I did a program last night, and I knew it was coming.
and i just knew it was coming up because of the material we dealt with last night
dreams of angry email and and some use of that any anybody in my position is
uh...
but but what kind of angry i mean what we what appeared to motivate the anger
in in those few that you did get Oh, I don't, you know, maybe just disturbed people.
I mean, I've had some from people just like, you know, you're going to die, you're going to burn, I'm going to laugh, da-da-da, kind of, you know, just some disturbed stuff.
Oh, that's kind.
Yeah.
I hope this is not a rude question, but you have had at some point in your life a competent psychiatric exam, so, I mean, you are Well, I'll tell you, I've always considered that what separates the sane person from an insane person is that the sane person stops on occasion to question their sanity.
Fortunately, I do that a lot.
You know, one of the questions at that last call, or the last one you asked about my disorder, I'm like, well, which disorder?
Because I'm highly dyslexic.
I've always been dyslexic.
One of the reasons I was a horrible student when I got out of high school, that was it for me as far as formal education.
You have dyslexia?
Oh yeah, yeah.
Isn't that bad in the rocket business?
Personally, I've never really thought of dyslexia as a disorder.
I see it as something that appears as a disorder in a world where things are used to a certain way.
But if you go back historically, people That have always been considered brilliant or have done big things in life and stuff.
I think you find that most of them, they would be considered dyslexic though.
I see things forward to backward as an inventor.
It's very beneficial to be able to see a project from the finished state and kind of, in my own mind, back engineer it.
It does cause problems in other areas though.
I went up flying with yesterday to get pictures of the property to put on the website.
Oh, those aerial shots we had?
You just got those, huh?
I just took those yesterday.
Oh, right.
They were the newest ones.
The newest ones that show the completed dome.
Yes.
I don't have a license.
I've flown with friends and family members all my life, but a buddy of mine called them up and we went and got an airplane.
I still get up there and every so often it's like, Push something when I should pull something.
So, dyslexia... Well, that's what I was saying, though.
In the rocket business, pushing or pulling at the right moment would be... I'm designing everything to be not... It's not... It's not so much a disability... In other words, it's dyslexia-friendly.
It's... No, well... It's nothing that's too... You know, like I said, I don't have problems driving or anything like that.
The point is, it's like... It's just...
there in this part of me and it makes certain things maybe just need little
signs if necessary pull this damn it brian don't push it yeah push don't pull uh...
right away you know raven in modesto says uh... okay then art should we call
your guest brian sky atlanta or uh...
so that's a good thing i got an email from a guy a brian walker in scotland
today did you really yeah i uh...
of i've had the i've had the email from all over the world I've done 334 radio interviews in the past 22 months, all over, and 58 TV shows.
The thing is, I never in my wildest dreams expected two years ago, when I did my first story, that this thing was going to continue.
I thought after the launch, of course, there'd be tons of interest in this.
It's just been this juggernaut and there have been times when I just wanted to completely stop anything.
But really the thing that's kept me doing interviews and stuff is the fact that there are times really when it's extremely difficult to motivate myself to go down to the shop and work on this because at times the project just seems too big.
Well, have you had volunteers, and have you accepted volunteers?
In the actual work part of this, I would think a number of people would volunteer, and out of that number, a few would be good souls who really would work.
I've had lots and lots of people that have offered to volunteer.
They want to come work here and work with me and stuff.
Really enjoy my solitude and just doing things on my own.
I have one fellow here locally, a young guy, Dave.
Well, of course, if something goes wrong, you only have yourself.
Well, it's not like that, but it's just like, for instance... Or actually, your new Russian wife would only have.
Right.
Having too many people around would be difficult just because it would upset the flow of things, and trying to Relay what I want done to someone else and not being concerned about wanting to look over their shoulders.
It's a very difficult thing.
I see that.
To give up.
This one guy that does come work, he comes a couple days a week.
It's kind of like packing your own parachute, right?
Well, yes.
I mean, there's a lot of things.
This has been my baby and my project forever and I want to do as much of it as I can.
There may become a point in time where I decide to bring in some more help.
You know, as I've already done in certain parts, like the rocket motors and things like that.
Now, going back to the full-scale model, if you're up 30 miles, essentially there's no air, right?
There's no air.
In fact, where does the, well, good, easily breathable air, is about 13,005, somewhere in there, feet?
Well, yes, for instance.
Beyond that, you better have an oxygen mask, it is recommended.
And then where does the air really begin to disappear?
Well, for instance, if you're flying an airplane, you need supplemental oxygen.
I think it's over 12,000 or 12,500 feet.
Yeah, somewhere in there.
Right.
If you go skydiving, for instance, you can go up to that altitude and jump.
Now, if you start getting the higher you go above that, of course, then you begin suffering hypoxia and you start losing your ability to comprehend what's going on.
And of course, flying an airplane or anything like that.
But again, you're going 30 miles, so what I'm asking is, where does the oxygen really start?
Well, I'm going to be in a fully pressurized... The capsule is fully pressurized.
It'll be pressurized to 6 psi.
And then also, one of the nice things here is that I managed to talk to Russian Space Agency into selling me a spacesuit.
And I bought the same exact... You have a spacesuit?
I have my own spacesuit.
Russian spacesuit?
In fact, can I put it on my website?
Oh, of course, yes.
Rocketguy.com.
There's pictures of my spacesuit.
Rocketguy.com.
And, yeah, I got a Russian spacesuit, which is the same ones that they wear when they go up to the... when they go up in space.
And it's not an EVA.
There's basically two different types of spacesuits.
You have your emergency spacesuit, and you have an EVA suit.
And this is an emergency?
This is an emergency suit.
It's designed to provide a Atmosphere around your body in the event of a catastrophic cabin pressure.
For how long?
Well, that depends on health.
The space suit itself is just a containment vessel.
I mean, once again, so everybody understands.
People who, so that people understand.
For example, the highest mountain in the world is 29,000 and change.
Right.
And at that point, they call it the death zone, from about 27, 25 to 25.
9, somewhere in there is a death zone, and people die at that altitude quite readily, and so that's only 5,280 feet, so let's say you're going to be out of air real quick.
I'll be out of air very quickly, but again, for instance, when I was in the MiG, at that altitude, of course, if there was a catastrophic cabin loss without the air mass, the oxygen mask and pressure suit, you'd be in serious trouble
there.
But that's why I have the spacesuit.
Now the length of time, of course, that I could survive in the spacesuit depends on
the life support system it's connected to.
Since this flight will only be about, in duration, 15 to 20 minutes long, the amount of air supply
and the life support system that the spacesuit took to has to only be a very short duration.
Tell me something, what will the view be like at 30 miles?
You must know what it'll look like, roughly.
Well, I'll tell you, from looking at it from the MiG, and there's pictures on my website that I took from the MiG at 80,000 feet, you know, at that altitude, you could see a very well-defined curvature of the Earth.
Right.
Oh, sure.
And looking at the edge of the Earth, you'd see the thin blue atmosphere and it would go pitch dark.
Yes.
So that is going to be exacerbated considerably.
It'll be quite a bit more defined at 30 miles up.
Quite a bit is an understatement, I think.
Yeah.
Big, big understatement.
At 30 miles, you'll be looking down on all the atmosphere.
Right.
99.99% of the atmosphere.
At 30 miles, at your highest point, where will you be with respect to gravity?
Well, it's interesting about gravity that gravity remains constant for very long waves in space.
The reason that the people are weightless, experience weightlessness, for instance, in the space show, the International Space Station, is because the The spacecraft is orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour and the centripetal force at that speed is exactly what cancels out the pull of gravity.
But if you were to stop the space shuttle in its present orbit and just brought it to zero miles per hour?
It would fall down.
A percentage of gravity less than Earth, but it would be marginal.
It wouldn't be like... Is that right?
Yeah, because that's why, because if you think about it, they're traveling 17,500 miles an hour.
You consider that speed.
Picture the same thing if you spin a bucket of water around over your head.
That water is glued to the inside surface.
When you begin to slow that bucket down as you spin it, the water gets sloshy, and if you slow enough it will fall down on top of you.
So if you consider that the space shuttle is traveling at such an incredible speed,
the centrifugal forces in there, if that was not being counteracted by the pull of gravity,
would have them glued to the opposite side of the space shuttle.
So that's kind of a...
So then really, in your flight, even though it's 30 miles up,
you will not experience weightlessness at all.
In fact, you'll have almost one G at that altitude.
Well, no, what I'm basically told, actually, is that what, as long as, when I'm accelerating, I will be experiencing G forces.
Of course, yes.
Once the engine shuts off, then I will go into basically a weightless period.
Oh, there will be a weightless period?
Yeah, for the period of time that I am actually From in free flight, as I stop accelerating and coasting.
Oh, no kidding.
Well, okay.
For about how long, do they estimate?
Well, it depends on the... That depends.
There's a lot there that's kind of unknown at this point, just because, for instance, the rocket's going to consume 90 pounds of fuel per second.
And so, it's going to be putting out 12,000 pounds of thrust.
And at the fastest, how fast will you be going?
It could reach speeds of between Mach 3 and Mach 4.
Mach 3?
By the time it runs out of fuel.
In 90 seconds.
So you're going to break the sound barrier some number of times?
We'll break the sound barrier very quickly.
Within the first probably 20 seconds of launch, it will have already broken the sound barrier.
Now, I've broken the sound barrier.
I've been in a jet, broken the sound barrier twice, Mach 2 and better.
How would you describe the feeling that you have when you break the sound barrier?
Well, you know, when I broke the sound barrier in the MIG, I didn't even know it.
The only way I could tell was looking at the instruments.
All the instruments that depend upon air flow, you know, vertical, or the air speed and care stuff, just as you reach that point, they flutter.
And other than that, I didn't have any feeling that I was breaking the sound barrier.
That sounds very interesting, because I went to Paris on the Concorde, and of course it's a very smooth flight, probably unlike the MiG.
But in the Concorde, when we hit Mach 1, you could kind of feel a sort of a slight backward and then a slight forward motion.
It was very subtle, but you could sort of feel a slight backward and then a forward motion.
It was really interesting.
Same deal at Mach 2.
Well, I'm very certain that different aircraft obviously have different characteristics.
That's probably true.
Now the MiG, of course, the sheer power of that thing is just mind-boggling.
The engine, there's two engines in this thing, and the exhaust on those engines are Like four and a half feet in diameter.
It's just amazingly, just a powerful thing.
Actually, on the way down, when we got down to Mach 1.5 at 60,000 feet, he let me take the stick.
He did?
I did barrel roll left and barrel roll right going Mach 1.5.
Really?
That was the coolest thing I've done to date.
Um, gee, was that included in the package?
Yeah, yeah.
Basically, the guy, my pilot, a guy named Alexander Gurnov, who's a very well-renowned Russian aviator and, you know, just a fantastic flyer.
Yes.
He basically, he was a flight instructor.
He flew the airplane.
We went up, and, uh, he was in the back, I was in the front.
The MiG-25, the normal MiG-25 is a single-seater.
Uh, the one I was in was a trainer that has an extended nose.
Alright, hold that thought.
We'll be right back.
Truly, only in America.
Only in America.
Launch himself.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast A.N.
from March 27th, 2002.
Get a break and maybe grow up to be president.
Only in America.
Land of opportunity, yeah.
Only in America, land of opportunity, yeah.
When a classy girl like you falls for a poor boy like me.
In America, and a kid who's washing cars, take a giant step and reach right up and touch the sky.
You are all the woman I need, and baby you know it.
You can make this beggar a king, a drama a poet.
I'll give you all that I own, just like a standard good life.
I'll let it go, maybe some day.
Let me show you.
Shake me any way you want Long as you love me, it's alright
Bend me, shake me any way you want You got the power, you turn on the light
Everybody tells me I'm wrong To want you so badly, badly, badly
Radio Network presents Art Fell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired March 27, 2002.
Well, I'm not sure Ben Michele was Detroit's bumper music either, but... Um, oh well.
Brian Walker, a.k.a.
Rocket Guy, is my guest.
And again, I'm gonna say this again.
If you want to call and talk to Brian this morning, It'll first require that you go to my website and look at the photographs.
I really mean that.
Otherwise, you cannot possibly imagine how serious he really is.
With all the joking around that we might be doing about this, this guy is real serious.
He's got what amounts to a factory.
He's built most of what he's going to use.
It's real serious stuff, and it's all well-documented.
Twenty, thirty at least photographs up there on the website, so go see those.
So that you can comment intelligently, otherwise you just wouldn't leave it.
I mean, you couldn't leave it in order to properly comment or ask a question.
So get to a computer and take a look-see for when we open lives, which will be shortly.
Once again, Brian Skywalker.
Grrr.
Brian?
You know, I really, Only in America was a much more inspiring song for what you're doing than Men Me Shave Me, but that brought a question to mind, and that is the following.
When we originally talked about all of this, you were going to launch the big one first.
I mean, you were just going to do a one-time, I'm going up 30 miles, baby, and the consideration of, well, Can I get permission?
Do I have to get permission?
Do I have to talk to the military?
Do I have to do this, do that, what, NASA, whatever?
Will somebody come and try to stop me and all the rest of it?
Then, you know, I understand the position you were taking was, well, hey, you know, if I don't have all the permissions to hell with them, I'll do it and face consequences when I get back.
You know, like guys who climb buildings and stuff like that.
And I understand that.
But now that you're planning three test launches of significant rockets, It's kind of a different kettle of tea now, isn't it?
Well, yes it is.
I don't want to be put in the category of someone that is going out and doing things that defies laws and stuff like that.
This isn't about that.
I know, but now you might be forced.
In other words, you might be confronted when you launch your first rocket, and then prevented from doing it again, or find yourself in violation of something or another.
Well, I'll tell you, one of the things I'm going to do is face those things.
I'm going to go out and get permission to do it.
What really boils down to it, there's specific reasons why there's laws, obviously, I'm not governing this type of activity, and mostly it's so
that other people, innocent bystanders, are not put in harm's way, which is nothing
that I want to do.
But the fact of the matter is that I can get in my automobile and become a much greater
menace to a much larger number of people than a rocket possibly could be.
So there again, if I had started at the very beginning of this project, if I had sat down
and said, okay, before I begin anything, I'm going to go out and find out what legal hurdles
I need to clear, there's a very good chance I never would have even started the project.
I agree with that, sure.
And so I always had kind of a little tongue-in-cheek saying, it's a free planet, if I want to leave it, who has the right to stop me?
Well, I mean, maybe the CIA, the FBI, NASA.
NASA itself does not have any governing authority over me.
The FAA is the local police, you know, all kinds of agencies.
But you know, I could understand if I all of a sudden just came out of nowhere and, you know, two days before my launch, We're going to do something like this, but that's one of the reasons I'm being so open and upfront about this is because I'm not out to pose a threat.
You know what I mean, Leon?
Of course, obviously, ever since September 11th, there's been some people saying, you know, well, do you think people are going to look at this as something that might be a threat or something?
And no, that's one of the reasons.
Well, probably not.
I mean, all they have to do is look at your history.
I mean, you've been engaged in this now long, long, long before.
September 11th was a glimmer in Osama Bin Laden's eye.
In a place where a plan on launching, wherever that may have been, eventually being... There are laws against killing yourself.
Pardon me?
There are laws against killing yourself.
Well, that's true.
But no, I live in Oregon.
But you're not going to be launching in Oregon.
You're going to be launching here in my state.
Well, let's see.
This is jurisdictional borders to worry about.
But if I can get a doctor to...
If I sign off that I'm terminal, then I can just say, well, this is my expected means.
Well, all right, then.
Don't you think that, let's say, when you get your rocket done and you put it on some kind of trailer and haul it down to Nevada.
Now, that's going to provoke, right away, there is some interest as people see this giant rocket passing them on the highway, or as they pass it more likely, I suppose.
But to be hauling a rocket down the road, How are you going to do that?
Well, right now, for instance, my test rocket is on a 16-foot trailer.
And it looks... I mean, you know, it looks... It has a very... I don't want to use the word menacing, but I mean, it's a big, long, gray... See, that's my point.
People, since 9-11, when they see this rocket going down the road, they're probably going to imagine all kinds of things.
Yeah, but not one being towed by a Mercedes SUV.
I mean, that right there kind of sets the pace.
Well, I don't know about that.
Well, there again, that's one of the reasons I've had so much publicity, and I've had so much attention with this.
I'm not real, that's something that I'm not real worried about.
And of course, when it comes time to launch it in that respect, there'll be quite a bit of hoopla, and it's not going to be just like me cruising down the highway with this rocket.
There'll be quite an entourage of support vehicles.
You're the Russian bride-to-be, right?
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, has your Russian bride-to-be asked you anything about insurance?
No.
No?
Okay, well, all right.
So anyway, so no Hooters Girls now?
No, I probably will forgo that.
I mean, I wanted to have my little cheer.
There goes half my reason for coming.
Well, hey, if you think you can organize and still have them come along, I won't talk.
I won't talk.
Let me put it that way.
I'm just kidding you.
All right.
You've taken time with your bride-to-be, and you've really sat down.
Does she speak enough English, or do you speak enough Russian so that you can have a serious heart-to-heart?
No, I tried learning Russian, but it's a very difficult language.
At my age, trying to learn a brand new language like that, the amount of time and energy and effort to put into it would be extremely difficult.
I don't know how you do it then.
So she speaks very little English?
She started studying English just about one year ago, right after we met.
She started English and now she's doing very, very well.
You've got to like sit down with her then and I guess show her a picture of the rocket and point to yourself and go, me!
No, actually when we started Correspondence it was through the emails and she had software to translate and we actually had for the first six months our email communications was our major, obviously just about our only way of communicating and was very easy to understand each other.
And of course, the first two times I went there, she could understand almost everything I said, if I spoke slowly, if I searched for words, and if I used my little electronic translator.
But she could not formulate thoughts quick enough to respond immediately.
And it was really kind of neat, because every time we'd get together, we'd talk, and basically I'd talk.
I'd get home that night, and she would have sat down and responded to me through the email, and it was really quite...
It was very nice.
Now, you live at the Rocket Ranch.
I live at the Rocket Ranch, part of the Rocket Compound.
So, since you've got a wife and a child soon to be at the Rocket Compound, somehow, I don't picture your Rocket Compound as domestic.
Really domestic.
It's not.
I have to admit, I do not have what would be considered your typical domestic dwelling.
That's probably going to have to change to some degree.
Well, the house, I have a very nice little log house.
It's a very, very nice, cozy log home.
And then, of course, I have the two shops and the dome, and I'm basically going to turn the home over to her and let her do what she wants here, because I've got now my shops and my dome to occupy me.
Wise choice.
Yes, it's about time.
It's about time.
What about at 30 miles, if you take a 747 trip to Europe, you get a pretty high end
of...
I'm trying to remember now, but about 38,000, 39,000 feet, they display the temperature
for you and it goes down to like...
I've seen it at 60 below zero.
Oh, yeah.
When I was up in the Nigg, for instance, it was probably 100 degrees below zero.
Okay, but up at 30 miles, what's the temperature liable to be?
Really, really cold.
Well, how really cold?
Oh, I'd probably, probably in that minus hundred degree range.
I mean, a hundred below zero.
Okay.
Well, yeah, a hundred below zero.
So how, the question is obviously, how are you going to protect yourself from a hundred degrees below zero with a wind chill factor?
My God.
Well, the capsule itself is a composite structure.
It's a capsule, it's all composite carbon fiber Kevlar epoxy with a, um, Kind of a ceramic-type paint.
I don't have to worry too much.
Actually, I really don't have to worry about frictional heating because, there again, I'm not going to be traveling anywhere near orbital velocity.
However, the duration of the flight is so short that the cumulative effect of both frictional heating or exterior temperature will not have long enough time.
For instance, some of the questions I've had, like, you know, am I worried about possibly the parachute?
Freezing into a solid block.
And it's like, well, no, because first of all, I won't be up long enough in those conditions.
And then secondly, the heat that comes off the eight little rocket motors in the nose of the capsule every 45 degrees pointing out.
And they're controlled by a pretty simple gyroscopic system.
And what happens is, instead of firing them individually each time the rocket begins to tip, There's a little lag time in the time that the gyroscope would sense the movement and send the signal to it.
And then, of course, there can be a not real consistently perfect pulse of that rocket motor.
So I'm going to actually run those rockets the entire duration.
They'll be running equally.
And then I will moderate them slightly whenever the rocket begins to tip.
And the heat coming off those will keep the complete interior of the rocket itself more than warm
okay of course my space suit also
uh... provides me a great deal of protection from the external
alright now here's something else the united states through NORAD
and uh... the russians and the chinese and everybody uh...
monitors serious rocket launches
I mean, we've got satellites.
Everybody's got satellites.
They know when something serious is launching.
And wouldn't that be another reason why it might be undesirable to have, without notification, something rising off the Nevada desert to the 30-mile?
Oh, that's why I'm saying there will be.
I mean, this is going to be, like I said, a televised event.
It's not going to be a secret.
It's not going to be a mystery.
It's not going to just happen.
This is not going to be like the guy in the lounge chair with the helium balloons in L.A.
Air Force Base.
Actually, that was pretty cool.
Did you hear that tape that I played?
Oh, of the hole in the ground?
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no.
I had a tape.
Oh, of the pilot?
Of the lawn chair guy.
Yeah.
Did you hear that?
No, I'm not sure if I heard the lawn chair guy or the pilot.
pilot of the airplane.
Oh, no, no, no.
I got that.
I've got the lawn chair guy.
I've got the real tape.
In fact, if, at my network, you guys, now that I'm thinking about it, would please dig that up.
I'll play it in the next couple of nights.
It's, it's, it's unbelievable.
You can hear him describing what it's like in the lawn chair.
He's got a radio with him, you know?
Right, right, right.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
You see, to me, that, that to me is so much, that would be a lot more dangerous than what I'm doing.
See, people get real freaked out about... Well, he had a parachute.
Yeah, but still, you have a parachute.
I mean, still, he was exposed to the elements at 16,000 feet.
Oh, yeah.
He was drifting in an area where... I mean, there you go.
That's the kind of thing that I'm not in favor of doing, because he was in an area where he could have caused an accident.
I mean... He didn't notify it.
But on the other hand, I mean, who are you going to call and say, look, I'm launching myself in a lawn chair, and nobody would ever take you seriously.
But you, on the other hand, you had enough free publicity.
What you're doing is obviously very serious, and so... Yeah, and getting back to your question about whether or not... At this altitude, and because of the low heat signature and everything else, this would not really be picked up as a threat from any... You know, it's just like the model rockets people launch, like we were talking about earlier, they have some of those rockets doing the 100,000 foot distance themselves as well.
That there again, if this was something done in the cover of night without any notification or anything, then I'd be absolutely inviting trouble from, you know, a variety of areas.
Military for sure.
This is something that is, you know, I don't have any desire to be in that category.
Have you been contacted by any official agency?
No.
Even with all the publicity, nobody's come forward.
That's why I said only in America.
You know, that really is true about our country.
Only in America could you do something like this.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things.
I'm out, you know, ever since September 11th, one of the things that has kind of kept me going on in this is like, Dadgum it, I'm not going to let them steal my dream.
I'm not going to let them quench what the American spirit is.
And there's been too many people that have sent me emails saying, don't.
Don't throw in the towel.
Don't throw in the towel.
This is important.
This is what people need to see.
I literally have had emails that have moved me to tears.
I had a one-line email that said, Dear Rocket Guy, I just wanted to let you know that your project has brought one father and son closer together.
I have no idea if that was the father or if that was the son.
I've had people tell me that they were on the verge of giving up when they heard about how many times I've failed.
Between the ages of 20 and 35, I went off to build a two-man submarine in Fiji, and my goal was to put these in resorts where people would rent them and cruise around underwater to see everything.
Pretty good idea, actually.
It was a really neat idea.
I was just a little before my time and not well-funded enough to make it a real effort, but there were six times where I had to start from scratch.
I had to move back into my folks' house and start all over again from scratch.
The last time, that was ten years ago.
I was 35 years old.
and if you know when you feel that big and you've got a literally begin all
over again it becomes
very disheartening and yet
the kind of response i've had from people that have drawn some inspiration from strength or whatever
from what my uh... experiences have been
uh... it's become a very important key element to this whole thing well you're
probably going to have your choice of media to be fair
Now, aside from myself, and I've made you promise that, aside from myself, what major TV media, for example, what shows would you like to have come and cover this incredible endeavor?
Well, you know, I went through this whole thing.
I've had so much interest.
I've had documentary filmmakers, people want to do this and that, and I've talked with A number of major production companies in Hollywood that want to acquire the rights to do a television launch.
Something like Good Morning America and The Today Show and that kind of thing?
I've done those shows already.
No, no, no, I mean... As far as covering the actual... Yes, yes, yes.
You know, I could do it either one or two different ways.
One way is to have an exclusive deal and do a a polarized network launch coverage. Well for God's sakes
if you do that have a radio clause in there for me.
Well, you know that they'll be two different areas there.
But to tell you the truth I kind of got to a point where I just started pulling away
from making any decisions like that because right now I am totally
This is my project.
I don't solicit funds from individuals.
Yeah, but it may be, let's face it, that a major network would offer you big dollars to do it, and after all, dollars are dollars, and that's development money, that's rocket money.
That's it.
I just don't want to right now be put under the additional pressure of someone saying, you gotta go.
That's more security for the Russian wife.
Well, yeah, but...
It's just, I enjoy the fact that right now I call the shots on this and no one else has anything over above me.
I am interested in a couple corporate sponsors.
Okay, so in other words, ultimately you will make a deal.
You just don't want to think about it right now.
No, and I did.
Last year I went through a whole period where I was in the process of actually negotiating a deal.
But what it boiled down to, there wasn't enough money up front in it for me to basically sell myself under the bondage of someone else saying, Look, we've scheduled this for such-and-such date, and you know... And in view of what you're doing, actually, upfront money would be very important.
Yeah, but there again, it's like, I'm pretty well-funded right now for what I'm doing, and if I'm going to put myself in a situation where someone else is going to be trying to push me and get me to move faster... Yeah, you're a real independent, alright?
Hold on, we're at the top of the hour, and when we get back, we will open up the phone lines.
We will.
If you have a question for Brian Skywalker, Rocket Guy... I'm Art Bell.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27th, 2002.
This is a production of the Coast to Coast American Film Festival.
Thank you for watching.
Coast to Coast American Film Festival.
While I look around... Where are you?
Well, the night is heavy on his guilty mind.
Just off from the borderline.
When the hitman comes, he knows damn well he hasn't cheated Have you seen him?
Now I'm stepping into the twilight zone This is a madhouse, it feels like being cloned
I've become enraved like a moon and star Where are you Lord? I've had enough
And I know that I've gone too far So you know how to go
Forced you to come, no When the bullet hits the bone
When the bullet hits the bone So you know how to go
So do what God's gonna do When the bullet hits the bone
When the bullet hits the bone When the bullet hits the bone
When the bullet hits the bone And the moon and sun
When the bullet hits the bone And the world's driven into the silent sound
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 27, 2002.
Rocket guy Brian Walker going to the phones here in just a moment if you'll stay right where you are
Back now to the rocket guy Brian Walker Walker.
Brian, you're back on the air again.
Okay.
This should be an interesting hour with the audience.
Um, so, um, if you don't mind, we'll just sort of, uh, jump right into it.
Okay.
All right.
Lots of questions, of course.
Uh, first time caller line, you're on the air with Brian Walker.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi, Mr. Bell.
Yes, you have noise and crackling.
I'm sorry.
I do have a Sanyo phone.
Okay.
I have a five mile, uh, a guaranteed radius from the phone.
Well, you must be out about four and a half right now.
Anyway, do you have a question?
Yes.
Um, excuse me.
I'm a little nervous.
Hi, Brian.
Hey, how you doing?
You have an excellent guest tonight.
I enjoy your show very much.
Yes, thank you.
This is Mike.
I'm calling from the Hub of the Universe from Boston.
Okay.
And I have one comment for Brian.
If Evel Knievel ever put all of this thought into any of his, you know, jumps, much less the rocket launch, he would never have gone through it.
Wish you guaranteed success in jumping the bureaucratic hurdle that you're up against.
You've seen the photographs, I take it, of... I saw some in Maxim Magazine last year.
There you are.
Okay.
From his backyard.
Okay.
And, you know, balls the size I can't describe, you know, made out of, you know, brass.
I can't... You expect to...
Beat the terminal velocity by re-entering the atmosphere to be able to jump out of a plane at the Earth's speed.
I mean, you know, terminal velocity has that name for that reason.
It will kill you if you jump out of it a thousand times, Mach 1.
Well, I won't be, no.
The one, the small rocket, the test rocket that I'll be jumping from will not be traveling.
That's going, you know, 15,000 feet, and I will actually exit it In a transitional period when it is actually near a standstill, because the rocket will go up and it will run out of momentum and there will be a point in time where it will actually come to a standstill before it begins descending.
So I'll be coming out of it before it reaches that.
I do not plan on leaving the confines of the capsule of a full-size rocket unless that was the absolute last chance.
I've got three basic backup systems in the main rocket.
And the last one would be to separate the two halves and get out of the thing.
But I have not yet been able to come up with a scenario where I would actually have to do that.
If you did, you of course could not do it until you got to an altitude, assuming that you got to 30 miles, and you then had a problem.
You would have to get to some minimum altitude before you could take any emergency move at all, wouldn't you?
Well, yes and no.
I mean, that's one of the reasons for having the spacesuit, is that in the worst case scenario, the cabin loses pressure and... Oh my God, and you exit the spacecraft at 30 miles?
Well, the... In that spacesuit, do you think you could survive?
No, I wouldn't go up 30 miles, because the biggest problem I'm going to have from that kind of altitude would be, and you know, when I actually Last year, when I went over to fly the MiG, I actually met with the guys at the factory that build the Russian spacesuits, and their major problem was, at a certain speed, the materials, of course, begin to melt.
Melt, yes.
So, I would have to get to a certain point before I would consider leaving, but there again, that's kind of like the last case scenario, and I don't plan on even having, I don't plan on getting near that point.
Alright, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Brian Walker, hello.
Hello, how are you?
Okay, sir, where are you?
I'm in Houston, Texas, and it's funny, last year when you did the broadcast on that fellow that got the tape on the balloon rider.
Oh, did you hear that?
I was actually talking to the fellow the next day.
That was amazing!
That was amazing!
I'm going to replay it soon.
I had just even forgotten about that until it was just mentioned, then I remembered I had that incredible tape.
Anyway, go ahead, sir.
I was curious, do you have any fear of your relationship with the Russians going up at an altitude to where there are things up there looking down on that a lot of people don't see?
And I'm just curious if he has any fear of his relationship with another government, just not as a paranoia.
He does have some intelligence and the technology and he's going to test something and he was actually getting right to what I was going to ask.
And I understand him departing the ship, but what's going to happen to the capsule when he departs?
Does it have a trajectory to land and recover or is this just a one-time usage?
First of all, I'm not going high enough.
You've got to realize 30 miles is not It's really not all that far.
Oh, it seems pretty far to me.
It just seems very far because it's a long way to fall.
But the 30 miles, if you were to pull yourself back away and look at 30 miles above a point, for instance, in Nevada, at the center of the state, I'm so far from being able to go anywhere.
I'm not in a trajectory that would carry me out of the area.
I'm not at an altitude that would allow me to reach an orbit.
There's very little threat to anyone.
What is, by the way, about the lowest altitude one could achieve or would begin to achieve some sort of orbit?
A low Earth altitude is going to be up around 100 miles.
100 miles, about 70 miles above where you're going.
Yeah, I'm a long, long way from orbit.
And, of course, the two major components that are necessary for orbit are orbital speed and orbital altitude both.
And I'm a long way away from reaching an orbital And you'd never achieve that, even accidentally?
No.
And to get to the second question, everything, there's only, on Earth Star 1, which is the full-size rocket, there's basically the capsule and there's the fuel tank.
The fuel tank will jettison when the fuel is expended after 90 seconds, and it has its own recovery system in it.
It has its own parachute system, and the capsule itself There again, I do not plan on departing that capsule unless the absolutely worst happens.
And there again, it's a couple, it's very lightweight material, there's not much to it, and the location where I plan to be launching from, it's not going to be posing a threat.
right well do you have a little city the beautiful story of course do you have life insurance
new well no no I never really needed it, because not having a family, it's like... But of course, all that's changing now.
Yeah, that's just more challenges.
You know, life itself is a series of challenges, and that's just going to be one new one to add to the mix.
I mean, is that something that you're going to try to acquire?
It would make some sense.
I mean, of course, then, if the insurance company knew what you were going to do, Well, you never know.
I mean, it could come down to... There again, this is one of the... Another additional reason for doing the test rockets and stuff is that I'm using technology that... You know, I have not really invented, per se, anything here.
I've been using technology that's been proven and developed.
There may become a point in time where someone would be willing to write me a life insurance policy for the publicity end of it.
That's a thought.
Yeah, that's a thought.
But there again, this is... I wouldn't.
Well, I probably wouldn't either.
But I have no desire to climb on board something and die in it.
Yes.
I just won't go in it.
That's clear.
That's clear.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Walker.
Good morning.
Morning, Art.
Hi.
Brian.
Morning.
Where are you, sir?
Cuperta, Florida.
Okay.
Listening to you on the 16 IOD.
Yes, sir.
Um, I have a, he just answered part of my first question.
Um, are you going actually vertically straight up, or are you, you know, taking a 90 degree straight up, or are you going to point it out a couple degrees, or, you know, how much drift are you going to get?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Um, the drift will occur basically depending on what the upper winds are.
Uh, because you know, there again, a lot of people, um, have Maybe some understandings are a little bit different.
When I go up, I'm still going to be rotating with the earth because I'm basically carried by momentum.
The time I will be going up, any level that I may pass through with different winds blowing in different directions, I'm going to be traveling through them very quickly, so there will be very little effect overall.
On my descent, most of the way down from The highest point I reach, whether it's 30 miles or 35 miles, depending on how high I go.
Most of that time is going to be coming down very quickly, and once again, I'll be passing through different layers of... Well, won't you pass through, for example, a place where the jet stream would be if it were in that area?
Well, it depends on what time of year that I launch.
I don't plan on going through the jet stream.
Good idea.
Are you riding it all the way down, or are you going to get out at some point?
No, no, no.
I'm going to stay in the capsule.
I'm staying...
I'd have to jump out.
So when I reach a certain point, let's say when I get to about 15,000 feet, if I'm more than so many miles off the mark, then I can open at a high enough altitude to glide back to that landing point.
That leads into my second question.
So if I get down, if I'm at 15,000 feet and I'm only two miles to the west of the landing site, I will continue to fall to a lower altitude.
Minimum opening altitude though would probably be Oh, probably around 8 to 10,000 feet.
Because that way, if the primary parachute system failed, there'd be plenty of time for the backup.
Boy, it sure would be impressive for the people on the ground if you can come nearly back to the launch point.
That would be awesome.
Yeah, sweet.
The goal is to come back and land in the same area where I took off.
Yeah, right in front of the camera.
Yeah, this has got to be done, you know, I'm going to splash down somewhere, you know, a hundred miles away and then show up.
Yeah, I understand.
Caller?
what uh...
are you going to take you know video still shot going up and coming back
all and maybe like it and maybe mike in your phone or going to have complete
telemetry uh... i plan on having anywhere from six to eight video cameras
do you ever watch you ever watch fear factor uh... i
i've not really got I've come across it.
I haven't really watched it.
You should probably, in fact, you should be a contestant.
What I was thinking was they have these helmets, you know, and they have a helmet cam.
Right, right.
And I guess you're going to have one of those?
What I'm going to do is, no, I plan on having probably anywhere from six to eight cameras remotely mounted at different points in the rocket.
And most of what I'm going to be I'm relying upon, as far as visuals, they're not going to come from windows because I'll be on my back facing up and the windows that I have, I won't be able to see out much of anything.
I'm going to have a flat screen monitor in front of me.
So you're really going to be depending on the video yourself?
Exactly.
Because what I'll be able to do, for instance, with eight cameras, let's say, each one's going to be connected to its own digital recorder because I want to record The entire flight from as many different perspectives as I can, because obviously afterwards that's going to be a very wonderful prize to have with that video.
And I can click either one of those cameras at any time and see.
So for instance, if I'm on my way up and all of a sudden I've got some very strange thing going on, a buffeting or something, I can click through the camera and take an external view of a specific part of the rocket at any given time.
But definitely, definitely going to Record as much of this as possible.
So that if a fin were to lose integrity and fall off, you'd be able to see it?
Well, yeah.
For instance, something of that nature were to happen.
For instance, when I launch, immediately at launch, there's a window of greatest exposure just within the first couple seconds.
If the rocket were to lose stability immediately after launch and begin to arc over, Then I've only got a certain amount of time to initiate the escape procedure, which is an explosive shutoff on the main engine.
And then to separate the capsule from the fuel tank, I'm using two, they've got two basic things.
There's six small rocket motors in the bottom of the capsule that develop 135 pounds of thrust each, and they'll fire.
And at the same time, there's Something very, very similar to like an automotive airbag.
And to not do that on time, you'd be driven into the earth like a steak knife into a turkey, wouldn't you?
Well, it depends how quickly after it left the launch tower.
It would depend on how quickly it left the launch tower that that would occur.
Because every degree... But that's a potential, right?
In other words, if you didn't act at the right moment.
Yes, and there again, that's one of the reasons why The one thing I can do to ensure my survivability is having a tall launch tower.
For instance, if I had a 400 foot tower and I accelerated at 4 G's, I would come off that tower with enough momentum to carry me to 1,600 additional feet.
So from a 400 foot tower... And that's a big safety margin.
That's a plenty good safety margin because that means I'm going to come to a stop at 2,000 feet and then begin descending.
So, the taller I build my launch tower, the greater potential I have of survivability, even under the most catastrophic of experiences.
Yes, I'm calling from near Phoenix, KFY.
I have a question which might sound a little bit on the paranoid side, but I was just wondering of your guest, Brian, Specifically, have you ever, earlier on before you became
public with your plans that you're now publicizing, whether you were ever believing that you
might have been under any type of surveillance regarding to any technological developments
that you might have done earlier?
I bet the answer is no, because he said he's used off-the-shelf, essentially, technology.
I don't even think about that, because I don't claim to be any great genius, or to be a know-it-all, or to be doing anything other than just observing and learning.
Using the best of what's available.
Oh look, you're a successful inventor.
Yeah, I am.
So that's a light up right there.
But my inventions are, you know, they're toys.
They're things that delight and entertain children, and it's not like I've gone out and invented any kind of serious technological things.
You could still potentially be entertaining.
Oh, I'm very... Have you ever heard of the videotape called The Faces of Death?
No.
I try to avoid things like that.
A lot of people say, at least you win a Darwin Award.
I don't plan on getting a Darwin Award.
I don't think you would get it.
You might get listed, actually.
like well no I don't plan on getting a Darwin Award.
I don't think you would get it.
Well, you might get listed actually, you might get listed, but because your effort is honestly,
all joking aside, so serious, I wouldn't think the Darwin Award people would put you up.
I really wouldn't.
Even if you died.
Yeah, I look at it this way, that if I die doing this, and I say this not of course trying to be prophetic in any way, but then, hey, That was my way of going.
That was the way I was meant to go.
That's right.
All right, sir.
Hold up.
Brian, hold up.
We'll take a break and we'll all be right back.
Stay there.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast A.N.
from March 27, 2002.
You know all my troubles will pass, cause I'm in shoo, shoo, shoo.
Shoo, shoo, shoo.
Shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, sugar town.
I never had a dog that liked me some.
Never had a friend who wanted one.
So I just lay back and laugh at the sun, cause I'm in shoo, shoo, shoo.
sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar down.
Oh I can take another heartache though you say you're my friend, I'm in now it's in.
You say your love is horrified but that don't coincide, with the things that you do and
when I ask you to be nice, you say you gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure.
Cruel to be kind, that's the very design, yeah, cruel to be kind.
Well, I do my best to understand these, but you still must abide.
And I wanna know why I picked myself up off the ground Now have you knocked me back down again and again
And when I asked you to explain You said you could
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 27, 2002.
30 miles.
Brian Walker is going in his own homemade rocket 30 miles straight up.
We're taking calls for him and sort of exploring this whole thing.
Be right back.
Well, you know, up 30 miles, if the winds caught you wrong or changed during your operation,
I mean, potentially you could get carried right out to the ocean, couldn't you?
Oh, not, not from that far inland.
I mean, if you think about my descent rate, and there again, I'm going to be falling, um, see, when I reach my highest point... All right, at the very least, into the mountains.
Well, no.
There again, if the upper winds indicate that kind of velocity, I just won't launch.
So in other words, you're going to have to have really good weather information.
Yeah, I'm going to have to know what the upper winds are doing and stuff.
How do you find that out?
Well, you can check with different weather services to find out what's going on.
Mostly it's where the jet stream is.
If you're not in the jet stream, there's really not that much in the way of lots of upper surface winds.
So you hope the jet stream's up around Seattle somewhere?
Well, it just won't be right over me at that point.
Otherwise, I won't do it.
But when I reach my highest point, what I do is, when I begin descending, I don't want to tumble.
And I also don't want to deploy a parachute when I'm in an area where there's no air, because potentially I could wrap up and get caught in the suspension lines or... Yeah, you've really got to fall far enough to begin to get some air for the chute, right?
Right, and that's going to take quite some time, so when I reach that... Let me stop you.
How long will you be falling before you can deploy even a drogue?
Uh, well, what I'm going to do at the moment the rocket reaches apogee, before it begins descending, the nose cone comes off and I'm going to inflate a large, um, it's not really a balloon, but it's kind of like a balloon.
It's an inflatable nylon type bag that in effect triples the volume or the surface area of the craft.
And so when I begin descending, it creates more drag without the potential of it causing me to tangle.
then at around fifty thousand feet that will separate and as it separates that
will pull out the drug shoot
and that way are you know what kind of period of time from from uh... apogee
to by the point of the drug uh... how many minutes or probably
be It would probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of two minutes or so.
Oh my God, so you'd be falling for two minutes?
Yeah, it's going to be a long free fall.
That's cool.
A typical free fall from 4,000 feet to 13,000 feet in skydiving, a typical free fall is about 60 seconds.
Right.
And, of course, you reach a Average terminal velocity is around 120 miles an hour
Starting from that altitude though since there is no air the acceleration just continues and continues
Colonel Joseph Kittinger set the world record parachute jump back in 1960 from a balloon gondola 16 miles high and
He came very close to breaking the sound barrier Really yeah, he was falling very very fast
Interesting I actually met him He's one of my mentors growing up.
I was always very, very intrigued.
So, wait, it's possible, it's conceivable you could break the sound barrier?
Oh yeah, the human body could.
I mean, the sound barrier sounds a lot more than what it is.
It's just the speed that happens to be the speed at which sound travels.
And yes, I mean, the human body is capable of breaking, of falling faster than sound.
Uh, he reached top speed just in excess of 600 miles an hour.
Oh yeah, that's on up there.
And, uh, you know, when he left the balloon gondola, uh, it was amazing because he fell, he falls away.
And of course he had no way of controlling himself because there was no air flow.
Right.
And, uh, you know, that's a real free fall.
That was a real free fall.
And it was only, he was, uh, he was, he had only had 30 jumps.
He was part of what was called Project Man High, which was the beginning of, You know, this started in the late fifties and it was to determine the kinds of things that people would go through in space flights.
And, of course, in those days they had no idea of what, how the human was going to, how the person, how... So you go up to the edge of space and jump?
Yep.
Now that's got to be some thing to contemplate and then do, my God.
Oh yeah, especially with 1950s, early 1960s technology.
Alright, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Brian Walker, good morning.
uh... couple morning to you are and use of thanks for taking my calls sure
uh... i admire uh... brian walkers courage but i'm awful uh...
fearful uh... the george calling from uh... new york and put you on
the other w a b c and uh... my i'm concerned that i i'm a former aerospace
engineer group and places
fine uh...
packaging for uh... rocket flight etc One of the toughest things for a launch condition is to design your electronics to survive the launch condition for random vibration and for shock loading.
And I wonder if you're going to pre-qualify your electronics on shaker tables and vibration tables before you actually put them through flight.
Well, to a certain extent, yes.
But then to another extent, I'm going to be relying very little on electronics for the actual mechanics of the flight.
Yeah, but you'll have video recorders.
Those things are things that could fail and not affect the actual outcome of the flight.
For instance, the engine controls, the fuel flow that goes to the motor and everything else like that, these are not dependent upon Uh, sensitive electronic circuitry.
Uh, the idea here is to... There again, I'm not attempting to go orbital.
I understand.
Keep it simple.
Keeping it simple as possible, and there again, this is not going to be generating the kind of, um, you know, in a typical rocket, you've got pumps and things that are all creating harmonic vibrations that operate against each other and cause lots of problems.
I'm operating on a pressure-fed fuel system that is forcing fuel into an engine.
I'm eliminating a lot of the areas that are going to cause high vibration and high stress loads for electronics.
Okay, well, alright, how about that as an answer, Conor?
Okay, well, as long as he's cognizant of it, because that's why spaceflight costs so much for NASA.
Sure.
Everything is pre-qualified.
The no chances are taken and there's lots of redundancy built into any system that has to control the flight of the aircraft.
So what kind of chance do you think he has?
Well, I don't know, does he understand his G-loading and does he understand his vibration loading?
Well, these are things that are going to be hammered out more in the test.
First of all, the initial rocket.
But there again, this is so far and away different than launching, for instance, a satellite or human cargo into space.
There's my window of error.
is so large here in comparison to typically what would be considered a space flight per
se.
Just the fact that in a conventional rocket, it's mixing liquid oxygen and hydrogen or
whatever other kind of fuel.
There's so many little tiny potential things that could go wrong.
I have a virtually zero chance of what would be considered any kind of catastrophic explosion.
Okay, I have a question for you.
Why not, if you really want to get up that high, why not go up in a balloon and jump
I mean, why add the additional... Because that's not the point.
The point of this is the fact that I'm fulfilling this dream of designing and building my own rocket.
Growing up, the idea of what was the best thing in life I could do.
Building a spacecraft to launch myself.
So, doing a balloon.
And you know, like I've had some people also suggest, why not use a balloon to lift the rocket to a certain altitude first?
But that kind of takes away the excitement of the launch.
I mean... Yeah, and it introduces a lot of other variables too.
It does.
Also, for instance, yes, if I were to use a balloon to carry me to a certain altitude, my risk exposure is actually longer Because the duration from leaving the ground to getting up to an altitude where I would then fire the rocket is a greater period of time to put stress on my life support system, the potential for other problems to encounter.
For instance, when Colonel Kittinger did his balloon gondola, one of his jumps, because he did a number of these, he had a pressure loss and his hands swelled up to like twice its size.
That would be worrisome.
Yeah, and so I want to reduce the time that I'm exposed to the actual risk as low as possible, and that greatest point is going to be in the first five seconds, because after five seconds, if everything has gone okay, then from that point on, altitude actually begins to become my friend.
Actually, your hand going to twice its size would be a precursor to exploding, wouldn't it?
Well, I mean, these are the accounts that I've heard, and when you score twice its size... But I mean, I think that way, if your hand got to twice its size, you're on your way to explosion.
Well, you're on the way to just a big, big expansion of skin.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Walker.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hello, R. Yes, proceed.
Hi, Brian.
It's a pleasure talking to both of you.
Where are you?
Denver, Colorado.
All right.
I was wondering if there's anyone at all trying to do the same thing that you are doing.
Right now, there's a thing called the X Prize, which is a competition that has been formed by a St.
Louis-based organization.
Actually, it's kind of the same roots that put together the prize that Charles Lindbergh won.
And the parameters for this is to have a three-man rocket that can carry a pilot with two passengers to an altitude of 62 miles, and then return to space within a two-week period.
So it has to be able to complete two flights within two weeks.
And there's a $10 million prize.
And there's a lot of teams right now.
In fact, they have a website, xprize.com is their website.
And so there's a lot of teams working on that?
There's a lot of teams.
I have not.
I just haven't signed up for that specifically because it's not really, you know, I'm not a team.
I'm not trying to build a passenger carrying rocket.
And I've been doing this.
This has been my goal has been a little bit different than doing that.
But I'm not aware right now of anyone else on an individual basis like me doing this the way I'm doing it.
At least I have not heard of this.
There are about maybe A dozen and a half or so teams right now.
Yeah, but nobody else singly like yourself who's been devoted to the Rockies.
No, that's what I know.
And there you go, Kohler.
And I haven't heard it, you know, in all the media and stuff I've done in the past two years.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you, Brian.
I wish you good luck and Godspeed.
Thank you.
Well, Godspeed.
I always say that.
Well, to the Rockies, you're on the air with Brian Walker.
Hello.
Hello, Brian.
Hello.
Brian, I used to hang out with you over at Scanlon's.
I'm a friend of Lee's.
I used to work at E21.
I just want to tell you that everyone in Bend really supports you.
Bend, Oregon?
Bend, Oregon.
And I've watched your progress from a toymaker all the way to now.
What's your name again?
Brian.
I used to be a promotion manager at E21.
Oh, I remember.
Sure, sure, I remember.
Hey, hey, how are you?
Anyway, I just want to let you know.
Oh, thank you.
I appreciate that.
I want, when is the caravan when we can go down and support you?
Well, there again, I've pulled away from trying to live up to an established date.
At this point, right now, my best hope is that by the end of this summer I will have completed the test launches and gone up in the test rocket and then I'm going to be taking all that data and during the next fall, winter, and spring completing the full-size rocket and I'm hoping To complete the main rocket launch sometime in the summer of 2003.
We'll be there.
Thank you.
Yeah, I'll be there too.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Brian Walker.
Hello.
Hello, Mr. Walker?
Yes.
Mr. Bell?
Yes, sir.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Mr. Walker, first of all, let me say I admire your adventurous and independent spirit.
And my question is, if NASA tomorrow called you and said, You know, we like what you're doing, but we think it's far too dangerous for a civilian to be doing, and we're willing to take you up in orbit around the Earth if you just abandon your project.
Would you do that?
You know, it's funny you asked that, because I've given some consideration to that a number of times.
For instance, when I was training in Russia the first time in June, Dennis Tito was there training, and I got a chance to meet him and stuff, and I've often thought about that exact thing.
What if someone offered me a ride?
In lieu of this, and I'd like to be able to, you know, part of me would say, no, I wouldn't abandon this.
It would be hard to give up that opportunity.
That's a $20 million ticket.
Well, it's yes.
And I've often given thought to that exact same very thing.
And there's just a part of me that would just kind of like say, well, heck, I'll take the ride.
but then there's a good other part of the greater part of me that's like no
i'm trying to do something here that have a little bit bigger and i would
almost feel like i was going out
so i hope i don't feel like i could open and every copy of the you go
independently and i i want to continue what i'm doing and finishes because
like it like a third or i've had i've had so many people for me so many
wonderful email actually that's kind of nasty question now that i think
about it well but i think that what you are very well-intentioned it's a
good thing that you could be with the human nature of the
Yeah, but it's a nasty question in a way.
Because I too, oh my God, the opportunity to go into Earth orbit.
That'd be hard to turn down.
Really hard.
It would be hard to turn down, so I just hope I'm never given the opportunity.
It's just like winning the lottery, you know.
You win a lottery and win a huge amount of money and you go from one situation to the next and it's not, in most cases, not a good thing.
Listen, a lot of people would love to email you.
Do you dare give out your email address?
Well, I have a, people can email me through my website.
Oh, okay.
So there's plenty of places, I mean, there's plenty of places they can email me.
Yeah, we've got a link to your website, of course.
Yeah, they can go right through rocketguy.com and I get the emails.
You know, that's another thing I've discovered.
Not only am I a dyslexic and attention deficit, but I think I also have an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I have answered 99% of my close to 10,000 emails.
Well, that alone will keep you out of space.
Yeah, that's taken a huge amount of time, but the fact is, it's something that's become part of this program, is doing this.
People send me some incredibly uplifting emails.
Has it happened at all, Brian, that occasionally you've had terrible misgivings, you've been ready to throw in the project, but you know that if you do, it's so public now, people are so depending on you for whatever perverted reason they have to go ahead and do what you said you were going to do.
That is a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure.
It is.
I've had, there's been a number of times where I've literally, where I have literally hit, I mean, I have a tendency that I can, I can fall into pits of depression because I sometimes just see how much I have to do.
And for instance, just so many things in my personal life I've let slip the past couple of years because I'm usually up by six in the morning and I usually don't stop working until 10 or 11 at night and that's an early night.
There's times when I felt like giving up completely, and part of it, at times, yeah, there's going to be a whole lot of people I let down, but at the same time, it's like, I actually thought one day, what if, what if this whole, I never would have gone to Russia and met Natasha if I hadn't been doing this project.
Right.
And I often just thought, what if that was the entire reason for doing this?
Would I give this all up and consider the fact that I met Natasha and Sergei?
And consider that reward for this project.
I think I would.
Natasha might put it to you that way.
At this point in time, no, I haven't reached that point of doing that, but I do a lot of self-examination, believe me.
me and you know it like a set of so what what is going to happen in the process
as uh...
uh...
i'll get or or or do that if and when that happens and and and and uh... i'd
I don't expect it to.
I know that she is worried from the sense of not wanting to see me die, obviously.
I've done radio and TV and newspaper articles in Russia because, as I was saying earlier, I'm hungry to understand capitalism, and there's so much wanting to develop a system like ours.
Yeah, well, you're a big poster boy for that, that's for sure.
Listen, we've done a program there, buddy.
We're out of time.
It's been wonderful.
You're just a great interview, and you know I'm coming to see the first test, so you've got to keep me totally informed.
I will do that.
I will let you know when that's going to happen.
All right, we'll bring our land yacht up and do a broadcast and stuff, all right?
There you go.
Take care, Brian.
Thanks, Art.
That's Brian Walker, Rocket Guy.
Only in America, folks, from the high desert, where it's just beautiful spring is on the way.
I'm Art Bell.
Good night.
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