Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Palahniuk Charles Michael «Chuck»

He's the guy. That guy. You know, the first person to build his own rocket-yes, right there in his backyard in Bend, Oregon-and shoot himself into outer space.

He calls himself "Rocket Guy."

Yes, of course. That guy.

Now you remember. In the hundreds of radio and television spots, in the newspaper and magazine articles, you're heard the logistics. How his rocket is fiberglass, powered by a 90 percent solution of hydrogen peroxide exposed to a screen plated with silver.

"It's like when you mix vinegar and baking soda," Rocket Guy would tell you. "It's a chemical reaction. The peroxide hits the silver and it causes a catalytic conversion that changes it into steam. And the steam then expands. Basically, the peroxide turns to superheated steam of about thirteen hundred degrees and expands six hundred times in volume."

A blast of compressed air will assist the rocket's launch. It will go fifty miles straight up, then fall down, slowed by a parasail.

He's the rich toy inventor. Engaged to marry the beautiful Russian woman he met on the Internet and dated while training with Russian cosmonauts.

Yes, of course you've heard of him and his "Project R.U.S.H." Meaning: Rapid Up Super High. The guy with just a high school education. You probably heard him on Art Bell's radio show and then sent him an email. If you did, then you got an answer. Rocket Guy has answered thousands of your emails. Asking for advice about your inventions. Telling him how much your kid loves his toys. And, what's amazing is, he answered you. Maybe even sent you a toy.

He's your hero. Or you think he's a big-mouth fraud.

Yeah, that guy… What ever happened to him?

Oh, he's still there. Well, he is and he isn't.

If you sent him an email-at www.rocketguy.com-chances are it's still on his computer. If you sent him an email, you're a little part of the problem.

In December 2001, Rocket Guy was working in his shop, working on the hydraulic lift part of the trailer that would haul his rocket to the launch site. It's thirty degrees outside, and the high desert is ankle-deep with snow. The twelve acres where Brian Walker lives, a one-song drive from the center of town, is mostly pine trees and lava rock. He lives in a big log cabin. A short walk downhill are his garage and his shop buildings. Beside them is his "Rocket Garden," an array of equipment he built to train for his trip into the atmosphere.

Sticking out of the snow, you'll see bright red and yellow, foam and fiberglass prototypes for missiles and capsules and rockets. In his shop, the white walls are hung with the prototypes for toys he's invented. Brian Walker is big and bearded, and his part-time helper, Dave Engeman, is small and clean-shaven, and, with the snow and the toys, the pine trees and the log cabin, the two men suggest a workshop somewhere near the North Pole. More like elves than astronauts.

If you ask, Rocket Guy will take toys down off the wall and demonstrate the ones that he could never sell. "It's tough, trying to make toys these days," he says. "The Consumer Product Safety Administration is so anal about how something could be misused. In the good old days, you could buy toys that, if you misused them, you could lose an eye or a finger."

Here's a tented stretcher he designed for the army. Here's a go-cart the size of a suitcase. Showing you the failures, hundreds of plastic and wood prototypes stored in crates, he says, "I want to do a line of toys called 'The Better Tomorrow Toys. They're going to be designed so that if a child had an IQ below a certain level, they wouldn't survive the toy. So you weed out the gene pool at a young age. Stupid kids are not nearly as dangerous as stupid adults, so let's take them out when they're young. I know it sounds cruel, but it's a reasonable expectation."

He laughs and says, "Of course that's all a joke. Just like the line of toys I want to do for blind kids, called 'Out of Sight Toys'…"

At the rear end of the rocket trailer, he's mounting a steel tank. It sits below four tall pipes that will slip up, inside the rocket. At takeoff, high-pressure air from the tank, channeled through the four pipes, will give the rocket its initial lift.

"The blast of air gives it momentum," Brian says. "If I have a twelve-thousand-pound thrust motor and a rocket that weighs a thousand pounds with nine thousand pounds of fuel, then I have a takeoff weight of ten thousand pounds, and twelve thousand pounds of thrust. If the air launch gives me a boost, then I have zero weight, so the twelve thousand pounds of thrust is immediately applied to thrust so I leave the ground with a more positive attitude and a much more stable launch."

In a nutshell, that's rocket science. At least for the first test flight. Inside the rocket there's no controls so there's no chance of human error. Simple as that.

"I'm not a rocket scientist," Brian says. "Everything I'm doing is public knowledge. I'm using information gleaned from fifty years of the space program. My rocket is more or less a giant toy. It's a big toy on steroids."

He says, "The moment I open the valve to the engine, that's when you launch the air. I want the engine at full throttle before I release the air pressure. If for some reason the engine didn't fire at the moment I launched, I'd get about fifty feet up and then come back down. The parachute wouldn't help, and the weight would be so much I couldn't even separate the capsule from the fuel tank. The moment the engine throttle is opened, the compressed air goes."

Hydrogen peroxide turning to steam… A push of air-just like Brian's toy Pop-It Rocket, which you can buy at Target and Disneyland… And Brian himself standing upright in the nose of the thirty-foot-long rocket.

"When it launches-boom-I'm up," he says. "And when I get to apogee, the highest point, the nose cone pops off and a parachute comes out. Then, as I'm descending, two doors snap open and there's going to be a little catapult seat that just rolls me right out. And I skydive."

It's that simple.

He'll be traveling at mach 4 when the main engine runs out of fuel. His capsule will separate from the fuel tank and coast for four and one-half minutes, until he reaches peak height, at about six minutes after launch.

"The acceleration phase is ninety seconds," he says, "and the whole flight should last about fifteen minutes from launch to when I touch down."

Fins made of compression-molded Styrofoam will help stabilize the rocket, then drop off in two stages, getting smaller and smaller as the rocket gains speed. His first manned test rocket will travel fifteen thousand feet, almost three miles, straight up. Then straight down, more or less.