Inventor Building Rocket In Backyard

brundlefly writes: "Brian Walker, a toy inventor with no college degree and almost no flight experience, plans to blast himself into space next summer in a rocket he is building in his backyard." Man, I gotta get myself a backyard!

Darwin at work?

I could submit this to the Darwin awards even before this happens, I can tell you how it is going to end if he gets 5 feet off the ground with flames under him :)

No risk!

Brian Walker has no wife, no kids. No startup to babysit. Nobody that depends on him. His death wouldn't put anyone in a desperate situation ('cept himself). It may be hard on his parents, but he's 35, all grown up. In other words, he has no moral obligation not to kill himself.

It seems to me that his trip only has two possible outcomes, (a) spectacular success and (b) spectacular failure. If the rocket fails Brian Walker will be instantaneously oxidized by 7000 pounds of 90% H2O2. Which really isn't a bad way to die if you think about it.

It's rather unlikely he will suffer injuries great enough to put him in a wheel chair but small enough not to kill him. Mind you, it isn't my intent to write off the lives of the disabled, but rather to evaluate the 'regret factor.'

It is unlikely Brian Walker will regret his experience, whatever the outcome.

Seen in this light, his rocket may be very 'safe' indeed. :-)

Ryan

He won't get the prize.

There is a 10 million $ prize for the first private space shot, but you have to reach 100km.

Oh well, I guess he's not doing it for the prize anyway, but it seems like a shame to risk your life and not get the honor. I think there is some other millionare using a much more sensible approach involving a 747 boosted rocket plane.

For more information, check out http://www.xprize.org/ [xprize.org].

My many years of educated rocket design experience

I've been interested in rockets for a long time now, and spent countless hours in OAC chem doing reaction energy equations to find the best fuel for a good home-built, *unmanned!!!!* rocket.

The most severe problem I've seen with rockets isn't deciding on the most efficient, safest fuels, but rather making sure they burn; expand; heat; react.... in a completely symmetrical way - so you can avoid pressure buildups and eventual explosions (or immediate explosions). Every documentary I've seen on rockets from German V2's to home made rockets - shows an incredible failure rate during the initial stages of developement. Failures which end in explosions.

Now my question is, would you rather:
1. swallow your tongue and choke on it for approximately 10 - 15 seconds before being incinerated in a disoriented haze miles above the earth ... or:

2. swallow your tongue and choke on it for approximately 10 - 15 seconds before being ejected through a steel casing, miles above the earth, and experience 5 - 10 minutes of your skin peeling away from your body as you plummet to the earth below through vast amounts of caustic, unreacted hydrogen pyroxide.

I know its been said, but it has to be said again: this guy has balls! (for the time being)

License?

They say he needs a license? Hmm, I've got just the case for him

"Plaintiffs also contend that parachute jumping falls within the right to travel protected by the Fourteenth Amendment."

Skydiving Ctr. v. St. Mary's County Airport Comm'n, 823 F. Supp. 1273, 1279 n.2 (D. Md. 1993).

Typographical error

Brian Walker, a toy inventor with no college degree and almost no flight experience, plans to blast himself into space next summer in a rocket he is building in his backyard.

Correction: For "space", read "smithereens".

Analogies

Speaking of analogies, the best one I've heard is that launching a rocket into space is much like placing a destroyer-class vessel vertically on top of a big pile of explosives, and then design the explosion so that the ship stays balanced throughout the launch, as well as preventing damage to any of the delicate control systems (AKA humans :).

Haiku

Home-made rocket ship
Recipe for disaster
Still safer than Mir

Might spur on others

This is good.

If he succeeds, it will convince others that space is really within our grasp. It might kickoff some real commercial attempts to get there

why not just buy it?

From the article:

Robert Frisbee, senior engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Really. The rocket scientist's name is Frisbee?

My question is, with the financial ruin of Russia, they must have buckets of rockets sitting around without enough cash for gas. Why not just pick up one of those at the Moscow Multi-Family Garage Sale? Russia may not have the hottest safety record in space, but it's gottabe safer than a barrel of hair dye in a tube!

Seems possible

It doesn't seem that unreasonable, considering that hes not planning to actually go into orbit or anything. He wont have to worry about heat shielding or the problems with reentry that a typical orbital capsual would. If he can get the engines to work without exploding into a big ball of flaming death, I'm sure he'll be ok. Plus, I'm sure he can computer model all of this.. think what the apollo missions were able to do without the assistance of an Athlon..

Why is it...

...that we always hear about these guys when they're starting, but never when they end it? This is the aerospace equivalent of vaporware; they promise a lot but deliver very little. I can't recall how many times I've heard about people taking spaceflights "For under a million dollars" when they're just coming out, but how many of them have succeeded? You'd think that the media would jump all over any successful attempts to do so, right? And why haven't we heard about them? They don't exist. A month from now you won't remember what he planned to do, much less his name or what toys he is receiving royalties from. Rediculous...
------

Hmmmm...

So it appears he's not going *INTO* space, but he's going to brush the surface (enough to check out the stars), hang out up there for about 15 seconds, then fall back down.

VERY smart, considering the trip back from beyond the atmosphere is *tricky*. You have to have the EXACT angle for re-entry. If your angle is too low, you burn up. If it's too high, you bounce off right back into space. This dude is just taking an elevator up, and using gravity for the return trip.

Although I suspect he'll be screaming too much to enjoy the view, but hey - Gutsy if he goes through with it. More power to him!

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:Seems possible

think what the apollo missions were able to do without the assistance of an Athlon..

Actually, the entire Apollo mission only had 64k of RAM at its disposal. Minesweeper uses more than 64k. Puts a whole new perspective on bloatware doesn't it?

Re:Darwin at work?

Seems dark humor is especially popular these days. :)

But anyway, call me obnoxiously optimistic, but I really REALLY hope that this fella is able to make his flight, survives, and everything goes well. You probably aren't wondering: why do I hope for this? I'll tell you. Because I want to do this too one day, damnit! When I was a little boy, I dreamt of flying into space the way Armstrong, Aldrin, Ride, and any of the other semi-mystical people the TV and my parents told me about, did.

If this guy takes this first step, as a civilian, whats to stop someone else (or maybe even he himself) from taking the next? And the next. And the next. Space travel is something I want to live to see myself, and I fear that if it stays completely in the hands of the governments that, as a civilian, I'll never get to fly there myself.

Sure, I could join the military and become a pilot or maybe transmogrify myself and become a NASA scientist or whatever, but I'd like to see the day when Joe Average Person can buy his space ticket, get on a flight, and take a jolly holiday to the moon or to the next inhabited planet over.

Is that really so much to dream?

Re:What kind of unstable?

A pendulum has a pivot point, so when gravity tries to pull the center of gravity towards the earth, the linear acceleration is converted to a rotation torque around the pivot point, swinging the pendulum back down..

A rocket isn't held by anything, so the force of gravity will only pull it downwards, not cause any rotation. Gravity can't cause a rotation (ignoring very large scale gravity gradient issues), only aerodynamic forces.

Any wind will cause a rotation based on the CG/CP relationship, which will not be corrected by forward aerodynamic forces in this case because CP is forward of CG.

The truth is that I used to think along the same lines as this theory, but I built a couple models to test it, and they were complete failures.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized the difference between hanging from a pivot and having a force along the body.

John Carmack

reminds me of............

Juan Ho.....A chinese daredevil way back in some B.C. century I read about once. In order to fly to the moon, he strapped a buttload of fireworks to the back of his chair, lit the fuse....and Juan Ho was never seen again!

Re:Might spur on others

You remind me of what people said about developping an OS, before Linux became famous. "Developping an OS is a big business" said Microsoft or Sun. Well, experience proved they were wrong, and that any good hacker with guts can start writing his own OS.

This guy or another one will prove again that you can do big things with small means and money.

Aerodynamically unstable!

At first I thought it was just bad reporting, with "Most of the weight will be behind, and gravity will keep the rocket pointed upward", but seeing the picture on his site backs that up.

Putting a big, fin-looking cockpit ahead of the fuel tank mass is going to make every breeze cause a heading change.

His site goes on with:

"What about guidance systems? The thrust will come out at the top of the rocket. An early American pioneer Robert Goddard did the same thing with his early test rockets. The rocket should "hang down" from the thrust like a pendulum"

That DOESN'T WORK.

It doesn't matter if a rocket is being pulled or pushed, all that matters is the relationship of the center of gravity to the center of pressure.

The reason why the intuitive "hangs like a pendulum" doesn't work out is that gravity acts on a deflected pendulum in a direction out of line with the pendulum string, while a rocket thrust will always be in line with the body.

John Carmack

My new hero

I have a soft spot for obsessed and brilliant people. My hero used to be Simon Jansen, the guy who is working on redoing the entire original Star Wars movie as Ascii art animation.

Brian Walker now has Jansen beat hands down. I the obsession department, he reminds me of the Aleut character in Snow Crash, who's such a badass that nobody else has to worry anymore about trying to be alpha badass.

The interesting thing about Walker's inventions is that he is clearly pretty canny about knowing exactly how crazy to be. For example, his homemade sub is really a kind of submergeable manned keel that dangles underneath a small motorized catamaran -- enough to give you the experience of being underwater without all the complexities of a free diving sub.

I personally can't help but admire somebody with this kind of persistence and creativity. Here's quote from him:'"The one thing I've done more in life than anything is failed," he said. "I've failed and failed and failed and failed and failed and failed." ' But of course he kept going and had made a bundle with his toy inventions.

The rational part of my mind tells me that Walker's going to blow himself to tiny bits, or plummet into the ground at multiple mach speeds as all the escape latches are jammed by aerodynamimc pressure. But jeezus, you've got to admit he's got balls to try something like this, and not just because he's facing death. This thing will either be an unspeakably humiliating failure or an indescribably glorious triumph -- there's no middle ground.

If he succeeds, I hope they make a movie of this. The only way it could get better is if somehow parlays it into some nookey (unfortunately, in my experience real women aren't impressed by this kind of thing, at least not from a passing on the genes standpoint).

Marvin the Martian

Actually, I don't see a single reason why this can't be done, according to the research I've done by watching hours and hours of cartoons.

My findings show that one of the most popular techniques involves using a giant slingshot.

You can find him...

You can find more details this guy and his inventions at his website [rocketguy.com]. He is apparently currently in Russia undergoing Cosmonaut training.
There is no doubt that this guy has far too much time and money on his hands.

-- David Smith
C:\ is the root of all evil.

It's not *that* crazy...

On the one hand, if you think about it, Mr. Walker not really breaking any new ground, here. He's established some reasonable milestones, not quite as lofty as the first US venture into space. He's using "off-the-shelf" parts to build his vehicle. The technical breakthrus required to achieve a trajectory peak of 30mi is some 40 years old.

I remember back in da' Day when I was studying to be a *real* engineer. <grynn> The theory to achieve what Walker is aiming for is understandable and appliable by a 3rd year BS Aerospace Engineering student.

My concern would be that $250K seems pretty light, even for the limited scale of this *MANNED* rocket (and required flight systems). I recall projects in college requiring larger budgets for the design and building the of systems to launch and control unmanned vehicles. Seems to violate the first rule of engineering - make sure you leave PLENTY of margin for error.

All the same, if he *does* do this without turning into human crater residue, I think I will have a new hero. Got to admire a man who sets his sights on something in childhood, and works tirelessly for decades to achieve it.

...anactofgod...

<Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentation of their women.>

www.rocketguy.com

Click here [rocketguy.com] for more.

This was in memepool [memepool.com] several days ago.

-p.