As the fuse fizzles

''Rocket Guy'' Brian Walker lost momentum, time and money in an ill-fated marriage to a Russian woman he met on the Internet. But he gained a new sense of caution.

By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 14, 2003

Of the handful of grand failures that have shaped Brian Walker's life, the Russian bride stands out as the one he probably should have seen coming. After all, few things scream "Buyer beware" quite as loudly as a personal ad from Moscow.

But if you are like Brian Walker, namely, the kind of person whose goal in life it is to launch yourself 30 miles high in a homemade rocket, you also are the kind of person whose threshold of acceptable risk is higher than average.

But you are not like Brian Walker.

You have never traveled to Fiji to build a two-person submarine. You have not invented your own fully operational hovercraft. You have not made a small fortune designing brainy children's toys.

You did not take that money and plow it into a vacation at cosmonaut training school (price tag: $10,000), a Sokol KV-2 space suit ($15,000) and a ride in a MiG jet fighter.

You are not building a 37-foot rocket, a full-scale model of which sits in a back yard that you refer to as the Rocket Garden.

You are not Rocket Guy, which is why the St. Petersburg Times went to Bend, Ore., in August 2000 to interview Walker instead of coming to your house to talk about your commemorative plate collection.

At the time the story ran, Walker had devoted most of the previous year to his Earthstar One project. He was working 12 or more hours a day and he expected that he would be lighting the fuse late the next summer.

A funny thing happened on the way to the launch pad.

Rocket Guy found his Rocket Girl.

To appreciate this felicitous development in the saga of Walker's life, one ought to know a little about his background. Much of Walker's life had been characterized by failure -- professional and personal.

The two-person submarine, for example, had trouble resurfacing. Commuters didn't seize upon the idea of the personal hovercraft. The military didn't want to take a risk on his lightweight collapsible stretcher.

Likewise, his personal attachments had been a disappointment. Girlfriends developed serious illnesses, or died.

"I don't deal well with relationships," he said.

Even when he struck gold inventing children's toys, he chose not to settle down; instead, he chose to blast off.

Married men who receive a windfall usually do something sensible with it -- they invest in a 529 plan for their daughter's college tuition, they buy bonds. They don't buy rocket fuel.

But his liberty had come at a personal price and he knew it.

"If I didn't have something to keep me busy, I'd realize how alone I am," he said.

Earlier that year during his visit to Star City, a Russian military base, for a five-day Cosmonaut Vacation, Walker said he was "blown away by how beautiful and intelligent the Russian women were."

When he got back to Oregon, he began trolling Web sites featuring Russian women. He had plenty to choose from. He sent letters to several dozen.

"I was very clear from the first letter what I was intending to do; build a rocket and blast into space," Walker later wrote on his own Web site. "If this was something she couldn't handle, I asked that she not bother replying."

In January 2001, he thought he had found the woman he was looking for. Natasha was 27 and had grown up in Kazakstan, but had moved to Moscow seven years earlier, after the birth of her son Sergey. In her e-mail to him she said she had dreamed of being a cosmonaut when she was a little girl.

"Our correspondence began to be almost daily," Walker wrote. "When I went over to fly the MiG (in April 2001), we met.

"The moment I saw her when she walked into the hotel lobby, my heart jumped (as it still does every time I see her). Once I could actually look upon her, all the words between us fell into place."

Walker was more worried about meeting her 7-year-old son, Sergey. "What if he didn't like me? What if I didn't like him? He is a very sweet, and nice little boy, who any man could be proud to call his son.

"He has no active father in his life, and at 45 years of age I have determined that being alone without a family s--s."

"My parents have told me that I look very happy now," Natasha e-mailed him after he returned to Oregon. "I am happy because you here. Such wonderful pictures of us! We are looked in a picture like happy family."

Walker returned to Russia in the summer. He and Natasha flew to Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea. They went to dinner and drew goofy pictures of each other on cocktail napkins. They went to the opening night of Vivaldi's Macbeth at the St. Petersburg Opera.

He told a few million late-night listeners of Art Bell's radio show that he had found his soul mate. He added a special update about "The Lovely Natasha" on his Web site.

But in the back of his mind, Walker wondered if he had found true love. He heard the stories about men who had been taken for thousands of dollars by their mail-order brides, but he satisfied himself this situation was different.

"I spent six weeks with her and her family," Walker said. "I concluded this was not a person who would let her son bond to a father figure if her only intent was to get to America to look for a better deal."

In November Walker was back in Moscow, this time with a ring.

"Natasha is my soul mate and I had to travel halfway around the world to a former communist country to find her," Walker wrote.

Her visa was approved in the spring of last year. In July, Walker went to Moscow to bring Natasha and Sergey back to the United States. They stopped over in New York City for three days before the final leg to the high desert of south-central Oregon.

Something felt wrong from the start.

"First day here, we pull up to my house. I expected excitement from her," Walker said. "Within 30 minutes she had sunk into such a state of sadness, I couldn't understand."

Natasha never really pulled out of this funk. She showed no interest in his rocket project; she toured his cavernous shop once and didn't come back for weeks.

They hardly spoke, he said. When they did, often it was to fight about Sergey, about his bedtime, or about speaking English at the dinner table.

Walker had promised to marry her soon after she arrived, but, "I kept putting it off because we could not go two weeks without having a major problem."

On the day before her three-month visa was to expire, Walker hired a jet to fly them to Las Vegas to get married.

It didn't help.

"You're not who I thought you were," he told her just before Christmas.

On Dec. 20, he asked her to leave, hoping that when she got to the end of his driveway she wouldn't stop until she reached Moscow. She got as far as the neighbor's. That man married a Russian woman, as well.

After Natasha left, Walker discovered she had already drafted a new personal ad. Her ideal mate, she said, was no older than 42. "I'm 46, so obviously I'm not her ideal," Walker said. He sounded wounded.

She said her turnoffs were thrill-seekers and public displays of affection. "Which is me, okay?" She wanted to live in a loft in the city. "I live about as far from the city as you can get."

Since she left, he has expunged evidence of her from his Web site. And he has filed to have the marriage annulled, which will require proving that Natasha defrauded him.

"From the looks of her new Web site advertisement, the guy she wants would be the exact opposite of Brian," said Doug Bomarito, Walker's Portland attorney. "How can you change your mind 180 degrees in four to five months?"

Natasha has hired a lawyer, too, but the lawyer did not return calls for the story. It's clear there's plenty at stake for Natasha.

"I'm not an immigration lawyer, but it's my understanding that if her marriage is dissolved or annulled, either way, she has to return to Russia because that's the type of visa she has," Bomarito said.

The rocket project is more than a year behind schedule now, due in large part to the flood of media interest he continues to receive. But there's no question that "the Natasha incident," as he calls it, has delayed him, too.

Walker still feels that mixture of anger and self-reproach of the recently heartbroken.

"I don't know why I was stupid enough to believe her."

He is still not inclined to admit that anything good has come from the two-year affair. He is alone again, emotionally bruised and $40,000 or so poorer. But to a student of Rocket Guy's life, this episode seems like just another essential failure, without which there could be no subsequent success.

Without question he has changed.

"Prior to meeting her, I was prone to taking risks of a considerably higher nature. No test launches. Just get in and go," he wrote in December 2001. "Now I have decided that it would be wise to be more careful."

This spring he hopes to launch a half-size test rocket in which he intends to reach an altitude of 15,000 feet before parachuting down.

"I am proceeding in a manner which not only gives me the highest chances of success, but more importantly, the greatest chance of survival in the event things don't go right," he wrote.

He wrote that with Natasha in mind. Turns out it will be some other Rocket Girl who benefits.

To read our Sept. 24, 2000 article about Brian Walker's dreams of love and space flight, please click on www.sptimes.com/rocketguy.

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