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Catching Up With The Rocket Guy
Jedi Holocron writes "The full article is at Space.Com and reports on the current status of Brian "Rocket Guy" Walker's home-brew space program. This is the guy who is planning to build a rocket in his backyard, funded by his toy inventions. He's scaled back from an X-Prize launch to a mere 15,000 feet with a sky-diving return. This could be the next ride installed next to Disney's Mission:Space if he has his way!!! All told he's now calling it an amateur rocket, however it doesn't look like the model rockets I remember."
I'm sure when it blows up it will make leaps and bounds for the american space agency.
Chinese dude tried this centuries ago... They never did find the the body.
Yeah, he was rich too... Rich people and their crazy ideas...
Winning the America's Cup
Building a rocket...
I imagine is shooting him out of the top with a parachute on his back the way that an Estes does.
Some people don't give up on their childhood dreams
So at what point does his 'rocket' become a mistaken intercontinental ballistc missle threat for North Korea? I just know some country will use this as an excust to test their own 'backyard rockets', only to result in accidental off course situations over japan... ;)
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
There's some equipment you might need when you catch up with him. For example, this might be useful. And to load him up, you might need one of these. Of course, to be truly prepared, make sure you have access to plenty of these and some of this.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
and that he's building a *rocket*. I'm sure this will inspire a lot of kids to go into science if it works.
I'm also sure it's good for him because he can turn around and make action figures of himself and his rocket!
Wonder why?
Anybody in serious contention for winning the x-prize is motivated by far more than the prize itself.
Those who are working on a budget that makes the prize itself impressive do not have a chance.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
For the obligatory Carmack post (after all, he IS a rocket scientist). Here, at /., John Carmack is the true J.C.
I thought *he* was the rocket man?
But the goals of the X-Prize are specific. A cheaply reusable rocket would allow for more moderately wealthy people taking the greatest vacation of all. As demand goes up competition will flourish, driving prices down further. The more people getting into space, the better - from the human genome's perspective.
Sure, it may flop. But it's a great idea, and it should be pursued aggressively.
He's scaled back from an X-Prize launch to a mere 15,000 feet with a sky-diving return.
Isn't that what a lot of small airfields propose under the name of "parachute jump" for $100, 1-hour training session included for first-timers ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is just wonderful, this is gonna remove all the prestige from winning a Darwin Award!!!
end up coming back down, dreams included. Good to see he as gone to compressed air as a propellant, it'll be a lot less messy if/when it fails.
6E8C 8721 B3D9 5269 5A9B 1122 00C3 C03D 99A7 1CFC
Then, there's the thrill factor. You've gone into space. Twice. And you've the technology to go there again. But it's too expensive to go it alone. So you start advertising for N'Sync musicians interested in a visit to Low Earth Orbit.
(After which, you tell him the music is carp, read him some Vogon poetry, and throw him out of the airlock. After which, he has 30 seconds to be rescued by a shoe.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In carting the rocket on a truck around town, Walker said he hangs a simple right to bear arms sign on the back: "I take my second amendment rights real seriously."
If I owned one of these I could change my bumper to stick to read "My rocket has killed less people than Ted Kennedy's car" That would be sweet.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The article mentions that he has his own distillery for making 90% pure hydrogen peroxide. John Carmack has mentioned he's been having problems procuring H2O2 of higher purities. What's holding him back from making his own?
Wow... I haven't seen a Gorbie reference in years.
I'm a professional ninja/robot.
"What's the chance of failure," he added, "when you have a pressurized vessel with water, compressed air, and a cork in the bottom? Probably higher than he admits. However, once the rocket reaches a certain height, it doesn't matter what it does, becuase he has a parachute on anyways and is expecting to use it. I am not a rocket scientist, but I know that he'll have to have some pretty light stuff (and a light passenger), because he's going to need A LOT of the stuff. That being said, I wish him the best of luck, and hope he takes his rockets to even higher heights.
If he's only shooting for 15,000 feet, why not just build a modern day ME163 rocket fighter? I seem to recall that it could fly at around 30,000 feet, and there was an improved B version that had enough fuel for 15 minutes of flying time.
If they just fixed the whole nasty "randomly exploding" problem it was prone to, it could be fun.
I don't know much about the lil rocket, but didn't the Russians also build a version? Anyone know anything about that?
check this out. Talk about mocking....
Why don't we all put our heads together and come up with a DIY space ship made from Home Depot supplies. We are all smart enough right? Collectively?
Those who are working on a budget that makes the prize itself impressive do not have a chance.
Actually the idea behind it is to encourage innovation that DOES make the prize worthwhile; the people behind the X-Prize would love to see a SSTO launch capability that can be funded at that kind of level.
Even if they spend an order of magnitude MORE than the prize itself, they will still have advanced the state of the art well beyond what NASA is currently able to achieve; NASA's launch costs are estimated at about $1000 per pound of material.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
... when i was a kid i used to dream of doing stuff like this all the time. I would draw out schematics of various vehicles and modes of transportation.
Nowadays, building a rocket is liable to get you arrested for being a terrorist or something.
do() || do_not();
Or at the very least, a very spectacular entry as a future Darwin Award.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Anyone up for a game over the Rockies?
Are you sure the Rocket Guy is not trying to catch up with the road runner?
This guy was recently on Invent This! on TechTV.
He talked about some system to distill 50% peroxide into 90%. Didn't Carmack say that wasn't feasible to do in the volume he needed?
As technology advances, it becomes tougher for the small-scale individual to do pretty much _anything_ themselves. I'm really psyched that this guy is trying.
When airplanes were new, anybody could build a decent one that would compete with at least the low-range commercial ones. Same with computers, cars, operating systems (but then, hey, look at Linux now!). I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how may people call this dude a fool, I think he's doing something really cool =:-)
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Play Six Pack Man. I
This is starting to sound like some of my more ambitious software projects.
Next scaleback: The Catapult Guy!
A ship poorly built is a raft
an airplane poorly built is a cart
a rocket poorly built is a bomb.
314-15-9265
I am mighty relieved that the rocket guy has scaled back his plans. My brother and I were so sure that he was going to die in his previous plan that we reserved the domain name deadrocketguy.com. Afterwards, I was so ashamed about it that I never mentioned it to anyone, but now that he's going to live, I'm going public.
darwin award winner no need to cremate him when it explodes blah blah unless he is actually crazy, he won't do it without being confident of success. im sure he's done more than a little bit of research and planning. you could argue that anyone who has got inside a missile to be blasted 100km directly upwards was mad. but then without those people taking (calculated) risks we wouldn't even know what the earth looks like from space. i say good on him, and good luck.
Seems as if he only had one leg.
Turns out he was a ME163 pilot and lost the leg to a young man flying a Spitfire who managed to hit him and blow his leg off in the process, but not quite take his Komet out of the sky.
My elderly friend said getting shot with the 50 calibre through the upper leg knocked him unconcious.
So consider what ensued: You wake up in agony, only to look down and see that one of your legs no longer belongs to you. You then notice you're piloting a heavily damaged airplane. You further surmise that your airplane has no fuel (Komet's shot their wad and coasted back to earth) and no landing gear (Komet's landed on a sort of skid). Now get the damned plane back on the ground to a dead stick landing without finishing off either the plane or yourself.
Radical dude, radical!
Is it fascism yet?
It's nice to see people dream, but is this guy practical enough to pull it off? If you read about his other inventions that went nowhere, they all end "... unfortunately...." and the mean old ugly world cops the blame for why his invention never became the next big thing. My gut instinct is that the rocket will also end with an unfortunately.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Wasn't there some guy a some years ago who tied a bunch of helium balloons to his lawn chair and soon found himself a few miles high?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Long interview on The Space Show
Also, the story adheres to Slashdot's usual standards of accuracy, as Rocketguy never did have plans for an X-Prize launch.
A cheaply reusable rocket would allow for more moderately wealthy people taking the greatest vacation of all.
I doubt those moderately wealthy folks will quite understandnd what they are in for when they sign up for "the big vacation in the sky."
It has to be the most fucked html/javascript site on the net.
Why don't we launch things a few thousand feet closer to space in the Rocky Mountains? Wouldn't that save fuel and reduce launch costs?
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I have reservations about a guy named Brian "the Rocket Guy" becoming the next space power.
geek gear n stuff
"He's scaled back from an X-Prize launch"
He may no longer be going after the X-prize, but, I gotta say, it sure sounds like a Darwin Award just waiting to happen.
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
Once upon a time, a junkman had a dream...
d /9 782/salvage1.html
"I'm gonna build a spaceship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it."
So he put together a team. An ex-astronaut...a fuel expert...they built a rocketship...
And they went to the moon. Who knows what they'll do next?
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpa
Of course no one that still gets zits will remember this show.
And now for obvious joke ripped-off from rec.humor.funny:
A Spitfire World War II pilot is reminiscing before school children about his days in the air force. (Joke best delivered with a good, thick British accent)
"In 1942," he says, "the situation was really tough. The Germans had a very strong air force. I remember, " he continues, "one day I was protecting the bombers and suddenly, out of the clouds, these fokkers appeared.
(At this point, several of the children giggle.)
I looked up, and right above me was one of them. I aimed at him and shot him down. They were swarming. I immediately realized that there was another fokker behind me."
At this instant the girls in the auditorium start to giggle and boys start to laugh. The teacher stands up and says, "I think I should point out that 'Fokker' was the name of the German-Dutch aircraft company"
"That's true," says the pilot, "but these fokkers were flying Messerschmidts."
He's got a centrifuge, he's mixing his own rocket fuel, he's made rockets capable of reaching several miles. This guy is clearly a terrorist! Someone, quickly, alert homeland security!
... if it were in a Volcano *muhahahahaha*
Really though, his setup is extremely cool. But how much cooler would it all be
there was a television interview with Mr.Walker some time ago and he talked about the availability of goverment surplus equipment he bought for cents on the dollars, military and space programs, pumps, motors, nozzles, machined exotic metals, he literaly bought close to a million dollars(or more) of "stuff" for a few thousand. It is great that these kind of garage sales are available, he must of been like a little kid when he saw what was available and it probably helped a great deal in the $ department. Perhaps he now has more custom made equipment but it would of been a great shot in the arm to get started. The interview showed him with his parts, his(a) capsule, helmet, and a big smile, he knew he was going for a rocket ride.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
The show didn't last because Don Knotts never played a character in it, the way he did with most of Andy Griffith's other projects (No Time for Sargents, Andy of Mayberry*/The Andy Griffith Show, Matlock, Return to Mayberry*, etc.).
It was a nice show, however, even if most people don't remember it.
* sp?
P.S. Here is your link as a link.
"ten million isn't much, these days"
Spare some change, mister?
The folks going for the X-Prize aren't going to making the kind of velocity neccessary for an extreme heat shield. As I understand it, they'll be making less velocity than even Alan Sheperd's Mercury-Redstone shot. Some heat protection is neccessary but far less than a typical orbital re-entry. And it's pratically a non-issue for a straight up straight down profile envisioned for the original project.
BTW, the Redstone was a single-stage rocket an reached a height of about 100 miles.
Rich people and their crazy ideas...
Only poor people are crazy. Rich people are excentric!
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Maybe Brian Walker watched the show Salvage 1 when he was younger.
"Salvage 1 was a short-lived television series [in which] 'a guy built a spaceship out of junk and flew to the moon' ".
His ideas didn't stink (except a Nerf pressurized cannon, that just screams lawsuit), but his execution really choked. Inventor geeks need two friends: a gifted machinist and a die-hard salesman.
I loved that show! It seems like every episode they used hydrazine (the same fuel they put in the rocket) to do something cool. One episode, they used it to create an explosion that produced gasoline from a tapped-out well; the gasoline it produced was green! (an unexpected side effect of the hydrazine, naturally...) But the well caught on fire, and they had to use a second explosion (more hydrazine!!!) to put it out.
A fine show, even without Barney...I mean, Don Knotts. And I now realize we need more hydrazine on television.
Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!
(...says Werner von Braun.)
.. when the nation is mourning the loss of the craft's five hamster pilots, you insensitive clod!