Brian Walker, the "Rocket Guy," plans a solo 30-mile ascent in his homemade Project Rush rocket using 90% hydrogen peroxide fuel and carbon fiber components, delayed from 2002 due to complexity. Test launches (15K ft) are slated for late spring/summer 2002, with safety measures like detachable fins, eight thrust motors, and a pressurized capsule. Walker dismisses electronic failure concerns, citing minimal sensitive parts, and rejects balloon ascents despite the X Prize’s $10M orbit challenge. His 2003 launch prioritizes personal autonomy over NASA’s offer, fueled by public support—11M website hits—and dyslexia-driven inventiveness. A televised, documented event aims to prove his dream isn’t a threat, blending engineering defiance with family reassurance. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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 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 Burrell, 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 Burrell.
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 those 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 Burrell.
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, 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 Isaiah 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 Striever wrote to Bill Mallow, 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 Louise Striber, 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 device of some serious description.
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 email.
I get so much email.
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 U.S. So I said, no, send it to me an email.
Well, Harold, I have not received your email yet.
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.
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.
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 earth.
So 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 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 hmm hmm You've seen this awful black water down in Florida, right?
Getting a lot of news stories about it now.
And this black water is 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 1 and 3 million bacteria.
Elevated levels would be in the area of 10 times that.
Researchers from NOAA weren't aware of the phenomenon at the time they were sampling between Key West and 10,000 Islands at Hugh 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, quoting, 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 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 Thank you.
There sure have been a lot of people involved in microbiology dying lately.
And here's 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. Stephen 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.
Amostow, that's M-O-S-T-O-W 63, was one of the country's leading infectious disease experts and was associate dean at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
Amastow 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 healthfair, a program that benefits thousands of people in Colorado.
The key here, though, is that he dealt in the exact areas that 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 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 news slash about there possibly being danger to Americans in Italy around Easter.
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 have to wonder why.
Only after his death would an article of this sort be printed.
Now, there's 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, and 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 roar 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 mega-project 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 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Didn't someone once sing about a highway to heaven?
I could not agree more with you that somehow I don't feel like we've been told the whole story on that aircraft.
Not at all.
unidentified
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, there wasn't terrorism, because obviously they don't want the airline, commercial airline industry to shut down.
Look, look, the commercial air, 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 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?
unidentified
Well, I think you've got to come clean with the American people because then you're putting other people at risk.
Look at the sneaker bomber.
Is that what America has 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?
But, but, but, but, but, uh, 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 irrefutable evidence, there might be a national security issue there.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, I was listening to your program last night, and I just think we're getting a totally monolithic, though, one-sided view of post-9-11 events.
And there's former CIA officials like Ralph McGahey, David McMichael, and others who got so disgusted with the kind of propaganda they were ordered by their superiors to plant at various media outlets to frame up various countries for attack that they left the agency and set up magazines like Covert Action and others.
And I think we're being subjected to the same type of thing.
listening last night i couldn't believe the third year kindergarten simplistic uh...
outright ratings of bellicos ratings of the of the guest last night and if we consider the uh...
It's just that what he believes about the God part of the brain and now apparently our self-destructive wiring, he is, you know, he is very, I told him right in the air.
He's 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.
They 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 push a button.
Now you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
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 was, 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 or something.
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 tenth 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 tenth planet that would seem to coincide with what a lot of people like Sitchin and Hazelwood and others are saying.
In other words, there's some mainstream backing for it, but we don't know much beyond that right now.
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 1 o'clock in the morning.
There's hardly anybody on the freeway in the first place.
See, I almost missed that commercial break entirely.
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.
But one of the reasons I was calling was I wanted to hear more about that soundtrack that you played the other night about those guys that had drilled the hole to Siberia.
What this man is about to do is going to blow your mind.
We've got the 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 superhigh.
That's what I mean.
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, Rocket Guy was developing ideas and inventions, both practical and amazing.
Now, we had Rocket Guy 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 am 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 All right, here is Brian Walker, aka Rocket Guy.
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 have been literally tens of thousands of people that have inquired about wanting to come see the launch.
And so I've tried to have a date up that would kind of appease that.
And it's just this is not the kind of project I can work around to get.
I mean, looking back at those, you know, the original Mercury 7 and what was required, I just, some kind of gut instinct told me I was not going to get into space that way.
And so I had basically a childhood dream that I'd someday grow up and build my own rocket.
And that kind of was always in the back of my mind, although I think for most of my life it never seemed a reality I would approach.
About 10 years ago, I began to start experiencing success as an inventor.
And this dream kind of re-emerged, 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?
And 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.
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.
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 been 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 immediate attention I've had has been, you know, self-motivation on a project like this can be extremely difficult because there's 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 has gained has done a whole lot to help get over those hurdles.
Well, I'll tell you, 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 here is survivability, and number two is success.
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've 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 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.
And it's 27 feet at the highest point in sight, so I can actually work on the rocket standing vertically.
And that project, of course, I started, believe it or not, that building began to go up on September 11th.
September 11th was the day that the work crew came up to put the kit up.
And, you know, like everyone else, I went through several months of just, you know, kind of this 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.
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 1 20th the fuel load, and the rocket itself is one half size, and I've basically wanted to test the features that I've 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 it empty, and then ride it up the fourth time to an altitude of 15,000 feet, and then I'll skydive from it.
It's designed that I won't come down in the rocket, I'll come out of the rocket.
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 rocket begins, as soon as that parachute's come out, the panel pops open, and I'll come out, and I'll just do what would be a normal typical skydive.
All right, 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 a program, tonight's guest info.
Please go to Brian Walker, click on the new projects, and go through those photographs.
Then click at the bottom on previous photos, go through the entire, you'll see the entire rocket.
You will see some 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?
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.
3 Gs consistently, you know, the thing about centrifuge 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 and right.
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 8 Gs, and at that point, you have to actually work very hard to keep your throat open and your chest cavity open, 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 Gs is you're fighting to just kind of maintain at that point.
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 six to as many as high as 8 Gs.
And I know I can take that because in Russia, when I did the 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 okayed me on the centrifuge yesterday.
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, a week-long, not week, a week-long cosmonaut training thing at the Star City, and they took you into Centrifuge, and we went up into zero-gravity parabolic flights.
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, 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 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 gives individuals the right to do whatever they want to do, basically.
In fact, you know, when I was out, I went to one air base 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.
And 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, you know, very excited.
That's going to be a very significant event in and of itself, just because no one's ever launched themselves in a private rocket.
I mean, as far as it's either been in a Russian or American spacecraft, any human being has ever gone up in a rocket, whether it's 500 feet or 5,000 feet or 100 miles.
go to them, it's like, for instance, there's a Tripoli is a nationwide monologue organization that has chapters all over the U.S. And when they're going to do one of their high-altitude launches...
Well, they don't only notify them.
They actually have to apply for a permit, and the FAA will grant them a waiver.
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 lawn.
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 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.
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, 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 the rocket guy ever skydive even once?
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.
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.
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.
See, 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 a 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 several hundred feet in altitude and at high speeds, they've already used up an enormous amount of fuel.
It's like if you had to climb a 10-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 even 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.
So 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 own fuel.
And 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 that 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 problem because it's such a simple process.
It's not like trying to mix an oxidizer, liquid oxygen, and kerosene or alcohol and control a combustion and a burn and where if you're off by several percentage points in your mixture, you could have an explosion or a burnout.
This is opening up a valve and allowing the fuel to flow through.
So what will happen is basically as soon as that valve opens up and the rocket engine reaches a certain point, that's when the compressed air launcher will release it.
All right, well you said now the test rockets you're going to be launching, which include your getting on one of them, is going to be about half scale, right?
But I'll tell you quite honestly, I look at this from the means by which I plan on launching it, by giving its momentum.
I'm also doing two things on this.
Not only am I using the compressed air catapult to give it its actual momentum, but there's also the fin setup on this is set up to where the stims at launch are extremely large surface area, which means at low airspeed they have very effective because it's comparing holding your hand out the window of a car at 10 miles an hour versus 60 miles an hour.
And then holding a clipboard, you know, your hand at 10 miles an hour doesn't do much, and at 60 you can clipboard.
You hold a clipboard out, and at 60 miles an hour, you lose control of it if you turn it.
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 launcher 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.
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 will 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, the permanent fin, the small fin, is trimmed for the rest of the flight.
Because of course, Matt's 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 of the shape of the rocket causes it to want to point straight.
Now also the main rocket, or the full-size 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.
Well, yeah, the three things, using the guided assisted launch.
For instance, if you've ever launched a small model rocket like a Lilesties rocket or something, when you don't use the guide rod and you just set it on the ground, it doesn't need, you know, it'll cartwheel everywhere.
There again, I plan on launching in an area that's so remote that if you figure the highest Where are you going to launch?
Well, actually, 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 there's 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.
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 is half again as big of a project as this whole thing is.
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, there'll be, you know, 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 that, because I can't, you know, 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 and knows what he's doing.
He knows what he's doing, and I don't have, you know, it doesn't make any sense for me to invest in giant, huge metal A's and stuff for that small portion of it.
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 there's kind of a Zen thing of getting out there and starting with these raw materials and turning out something.
And that tank, 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.
Well, my point when I asked was, and still is, I mean, obviously she is going to be, I guess, supportive of what you're about to do, or does she have questions?
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.
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 would find love at this point in my life, but that's what it is.
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.
The End Once again, here is Brian Walker, aka 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, would there be anything else where would you then say, look, I have achieved my goal, I've made history, so I quit?
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?
Well, 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 that 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.
And then 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.
And 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.
And that's one of the reasons that I was really happy to be able to get back on your show is 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's I've had some kind of I've had some pretty ugly emails from people.
Well, I'll tell you, I've always considered that what separates a sane person from an insane person is the sane person stops on occasion to question their sanity.
Fortunately, I do that a lot.
You know, one of the questions that last call or the last one you asked about my disorder, I'm like, well, which disorder?
I don't, 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 would consider.
Well, no, be considered dyslexic, though.
I see things forward to backward.
And 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 yesterday to get pictures of the property to put in the website.
I got an email from Brian Walker in Scotland today.
Did you really?
Yeah, I've had emails from all over the world.
I've done 334 radio interviews in the past 22 months.
I mean, all over in 58 TV shows.
And, you know, the thing is here, I never, in my wildest dreams, expected two years ago when I did my first story that this thing was going to continue.
I mean, I thought after the launch, of course, there'd be tons of interest in this, but it's just been this juggernaut, and there's 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's 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.
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 mean, there's a lot of things that I just, this has been my baby and my project forever, and I want to do as much of it as I can.
And 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.
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 there again, like, for instance, when I was in the MiG, at that altitude, of course, if there was a castro, the cabin loss without the air, without the air mask, 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's hook to has to only be a very short duration.
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.
Well, this is an interesting about gravity, that gravity remains constant for a very long ways in space.
The reason that the people are weightless, experience weightlessness, for instance, in the space show at the International Space Station, is because the spacecraft is orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, and the centrifugal force at that speed is exactly cancels out the pull of gravity.
everyone's fall down have they have of a percentage gravity left the nurse but it would be normal it would be it would be marginal wouldn't be like his 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 swashy.
And if you slow 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, you know, there's a 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, 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 airflow, you know, vertical or the air speed indicator and stuff.
As just as you reach that point, they flutter.
And other than that, I didn't have any feeling that I was breaking a sound barrier.
I mean, basically, the guy that my pilot, a guy named Alexander Gurnov, who's a very well-renowned Russian aviator and just a fantastic flyer, he basically, he was the flight instructor.
He flew the airplane, and we went up, and he was in the back, I was in the front.
The MiG-25, the normal MiG-25 is a single-seater.
The one I was in was a trainer that has an extended nose.
Well, I'm not sure Ben Miche Me was a good choice of bumper music either, but.
Um, oh well, uh, Brian Walker, aka Rocket Guy, is my guest.
And again, I'm gonna say this again.
If you wanna call and talk to Brian this morning, it'll it'll uh first require that you go to my website and look at the photographs.
I really mean that.
Uh otherwise you cannot possibly imagine how serious he really is.
Of 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.
20, 30 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 then take a look see for when we open lines which will be shortly Once again, Brian Skywalker.
Brian, you know, I really, only in America was a much more inspiring song for what you're doing than Ben Me Shape 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, you know, 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?
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, 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, I know, but I mean, 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.
I mean, what it really boils down to it, there's specific reasons why there's laws, obviously, 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, I can get in my automobile and become a much greater menace to a much larger number of people than the 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, it's a very good chance I never would have even started the project.
And I could understand if I all of a sudden just came out of nowhere and, you know, two days before my launch was 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, I mean, 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?
Yeah, 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 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, 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 those 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 hoop-a-law, and it's not going to be just like me cruising down the highway with this rocket.
No, I tried learning Russian, but it's a very difficult language, and 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.
No, actually, when we started corresponding, it was through the emails, and she had software to transfer.
And we actually had, for the first six months, our email communications was our major, obviously just about our only way of communicating.
It 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 and 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 nice.
Now, if you take a 757 or 747 trip to Europe, you get a pretty high.
And, you know, 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.
Well, the capsule itself is a composite structure.
The capsule is all composite carbon fiber Kevlar epoxy with 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 a 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 pouring out.
And they're controlled by a pretty simple gyroscopic system that just...
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.
But on the other hand, I mean, who are you going to call and say, look, you know, 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, and what you're doing is obviously very serious.
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, just like the model rockets people launched, like we were talking about earlier, they have some of those rockets going to hundred thousand-foot distance themselves as well.
And 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 a variety of areas.
Yeah, I mean, and 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 this is like, dad government, 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, you know, don't throw in the towel.
Don't throw in the towel.
This is important.
This is what people need to see.
I mean, 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.
And I have no idea if that was the father, if that was the son.
You know, I've had people tell me that they were on the verge of giving up when they'd heard about how many times I've failed.
Because between the ages of 20 and 35, I went off to do my, I built 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.
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 was so, you know, I had to start from scratch.
I had to move back into my folks' house and start all over again from scratch.
And the last time, that was 10 years ago.
I was 35 years old.
And, you know, when you fail that big and you've got to 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 and some strength or whatever from what my experiences have been, 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 there.
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, yeah, there'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 autonomous.
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 into the bondage of someone else saying, look, we've scheduled this for such and such date.
The small rocket, the test rocket that I'll be jumping from, will not be traveling.
That's going much, 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'll run out of momentum, and there'll be a point in time where it is actually coming 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, the 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 in the but I have not yet been able to come up with a scenario where I would actually have to do that.
No, I wouldn't go up 30 miles because the biggest problem I'm going to have from that kind of altitude would be 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.
I had just even forgotten about that until it was just mentioned.
Then I remembered I had that incredible tape.
Anyway, go ahead, sir.
unidentified
I was curious when, and does he have any fear?
Do you have any fear of your relationship with the Russians in going up at an altitude to where there's 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, but 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?
It just seems very far because it's a long ways to fall.
But 30 miles, if you were to pull yourself back away and look at 30 miles above a point, for instance, in Nevada, 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.
And to get to a second question, everything, there's only on Earth Star 1, which is a full-size rocket, there's basically the capsule and there's a 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 possible thing.
And there again, 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.
There again, this is one of another additional reasons 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 come a point in time where someone would be willing to write me a life insurance policy for the publicity end of it.
The drift will occur basically depending on what the upper winds are.
Because again, a lot of people have maybe some understandings that are a little bit different than, you know, when I go up, I'm still going to be still rotating with the Earth because I'm basically carrying it 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'll be very little effect overall.
And 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, it depends on the time of year that I launch.
I'm staying snug inside the capsule unless, there again, unless it's the worst case scenario and I have to leave it.
But the capsule will fall, and when it reaches a point, for instance, the landing gear or the landing system consists of a drug chute that will come out at about 50,000 feet and will slow my descent and stabilize.
And then I have a landing parafoil similar to what a skydiver uses, which has a 3 to 1 glide ratio.
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.
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 probably around 8,000 to 10,000 feet, because that way, if the primary parachute system failed, there'd be plenty of time for the backup.
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 relying upon as far as visuals are 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.
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 very wonderful prize to have is that video.
And I can click to 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 to 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.
Well, yeah, for instance, yeah, if something of that nature were to happen, then for instance, when I launch immediately at launch, there's a window of greatest exposure is 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 on 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.
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...
Yes, and 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 Gs, I would come off that tower with enough momentum to carry me to 1,600 additional feet.
So from a 400-foot tower, that's a plenty of 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.
West of the Rockies, you're on air with Brian Walker.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, I'm calling from near Phoenix, KFYI.
Yes, sir.
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?
Yeah, no, I'm not, I don't even think about that because, you know, 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 and using the best of what's available.
Yeah, even if I look at it this way, that if I die doing this, and I say this not, of course, in trying to be prophetic in any way, but then, hey, that was my way of going.
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?
Well, it just won't be right over me at that point.
Otherwise, I won't do it.
But also, 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.
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, 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 as I begin descending, it creates more drag without the potential of it causing me to tangle.
Then at around 50,000 feet, that will separate, and as it separates, that will pull out the drogue chute.
And that way...
It would probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of two minutes or so.
Yeah, it's going to be a long free fall because a typical free fall from 12,000 feet or 13,000 feet in skydiving, a typical free fall is about 60 seconds.
Right.
And of course, you reach an 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's record Gershe jump back in 1960 from a bloom gondola 16 miles high and he came very close to breaking the sound barrier really yeah he he was falling very, very fast.
And, you know, when he left the Bloom Gondola, it was amazing because he falls away, and, of course, he had no way of controlling himself because there was no airflow.
He was part of what was called Project Manhai, which was the beginning of, you know, this started in the late 50s, 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 how the human was going to, how the person, how.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Brian Walker.
Good morning.
unidentified
Top of the morning to you, Art, and thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
I admire Brian Walker's courage, but I'm also fearful.
This is George Colling from New York, this new and WABC.
And I'm concerned that I'm a former aerospace engineer, and I used to design packaging for rocket flight, etc.
One of the toughest things for a launch condition is to design your electronics to survive a 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.
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 sensitive electronic circuitry.
The idea here is to keep it as simple as possible.
And there again, this is not going to be generating the kind of, 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, and I'm eliminating a lot of the areas that are going to cause high vibration and high stress loads for electronics.
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.
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 that'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.
why not if you really want to get up that high why not go up in a balloon and jump i mean why i had the additional The point of this is the fact that I'm fulfilling this dream of designing and building my own rocket.
I mean, growing up, the idea of what was the best thing in life I could do, and that, well, 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?
that kind of takes away the the excitement of the of the watch 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.
Like, 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 hand swolled up to like twice its size.
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 routes 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 it's a $10 million prize, and there's a lot of teams right now.
In fact, they have a website, xprize.com, as their website.
And yet I just haven't signed up for that specifically because it's not really, you know, I'm not a team, and I'm not trying to build a passenger-carrying rocket.
And I've been doing this.
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.
There are about maybe a dozen and a half or so teams right now.
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 ask that because I've given some consideration to that a number of times.
Because, for instance, when I was training in Russia the first time in June, Dennis Tito was there at training and I had 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.
really hard it would it would be hard to turn out for i just uh...
i just hope i'm never given the opportunity You win a lottery and win a huge amount of money, and you go from one situation to the next, and it's not, it's most cases not a good thing.
And yeah, they can go right through rocketguide.com and I get the emails.
And, 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 because I have answered 99% of my close to 10,000 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're going to do, that is a lot of pressure.
There's been a number of times where I have literally hit.
I mean, I have a tendency that I can fall into fits of depression because sometimes to 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 years because I'm usually up by 6 in the morning and I usually don't stop working until 10 or 11 at night, and that's an early night.
And there's times when I felt like giving up completely.
And part of it, sometimes at times, yeah, there's going to be a whole lot of people I let down.
But then 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.
And I often 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?