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.

"It's not like I'm going to have a lot of stuff falling," he says. "I'm going to have eight fin sections, fluttering down like leaves. And that one fuel tank. And I plan to have the fuel tank recovered for posterity, because I plan on having my capsule and the fuel tank and the whole rocket hanging in the Smithsonian Museum or some other prominent air and space museum. I talked to the Smithsonian and they said, yeah, if I build and launch my own private rocket, and it's the first one, they definitely will hang it."

That's the plan, fifteen minutes of fame and then straight into the history books.

All this will take place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert-where the annual Burning Man festival is held-the only place that can accommodate the quarter of a million people Brian expects to attend.

This has been Brian Walker's dream since he was nine years old. His father took him to his first air show when Brian was twelve. Two weeks after he turned sixteen, he made his first skydive. In 1974, when he was eighteen years old, he was almost dragged behind the plane while making a static-line jump. He froze, his hands locked on the wing, and the plane had to land with him still hanging there. He didn't jump again for seventeen years.

About his education, Brian will tell you, "I'm dyslexic, and ADHD, and school was torture for me. I tried two terms in college, to take engineering, and it was more or less to appease my dad. I took two terms toward a mechanical engineering degree at OIT and decided, 'This is not what I want. The partying almost killed me. The only thing I could do to maintain my sanity was to stay as mind-altered as possible."

He tends to get plantar warts, and uses a plasma welder to burn them off. "It's great for removing warts," he says. "But it leaves a nice little crater in your foot. As quick as I can pull and release the trigger, it sends a pulse of plasma that vaporizes the skin. It hurts like hell."

He says, "I used a soldering iron once before."

For Brian, five hours is a good night's sleep. Despite new pillows and a down comforter, he's an insomniac, just like his dad. He has no hobbies, other than inventing. He doesn't use the Lord's name in vain and says a Britney Spears concert is just a sex show. And doesn't approve of the Harry Potter books, because of the witchcraft. He has no pet, not right now in 2001, but he had a flying squirrel named Benny that died of an aneurysm after nine years. After that, he had a sugar glider, explaining, "It's the marsupial equivalent of a flying squirrel." For the movie version of his life, he'd cast Mel Gibson or Heath Ledger.

"Growing up," he says, "I was just never a big sports person. I just had a feeling that I was viewed as being less of a man since I didn't know statistics about players of sports. I just have this really jaded view that sports has become artificially elevated to a level of importance that it shouldn't have. They seem to want to make an art and an entire lifestyle out of analyzing games and players. You go into every single bar in America and all they show on the TV is sports and sports shows. And I have to be honest, in every basketball game I've ever watched-and I've watched quite a few-I've never seen anything new. I'm just a little bit bothered by the fact that, if you're not an ardent, hardened sports fan who knows all the aspects of the game, then somehow you're not really a man's man."

In a sports bar, at lunch, he stops talking to watch a computer graphic on television showing an electromagnetic pulse "E bomb" explode over a city. He orders a Big Bad Bob Burger with an extra slice of raw onion. Even in December, he drinks ice water. He grew up in the Parkrose district of Portland, Oregon.

Over lunch, he complains about how American astronauts get a lifetime of training and experience at taxpayer expense and then make their fortune as celebrities based on that experience. Then, how wealthy American citizens have been slammed in the public mind for paying money to ride along on Russian space missions. How the dream of space travel needs to be opened up to people who don't want a lifelong military career.