Dean Guernsey / The BulletinBrian Walker works with one of his inventions, an air-powered rocket launcher, outside in his workshop in Bend.

Fifteen years after he announced plans to launch himself to the edge of space in a homemade rocket, Bend’s Brian Walker remains earthbound.

Walker, now 59, was widely known as “Rocketguy” during his nearly three years in the spotlight, when he appeared on dozens of television talk shows to discuss his dream of becoming the first person to mount a do-it-yourself mission to space.

Due to his hectic media tour schedule and an unanticipated sharp decline in his income, Walker was never able to complete the rocket he hoped to ride 35 to 50 miles into the sky. A brief marriage failed, and Walker slipped into a deep depression, battling suicidal thoughts and struggling to regain the creative spark he’d enjoyed in earlier years.

In the years that followed, he sold off “Cape Sagebrush,” the miniature spaceflight training campus he’d built on the northeast fringe of Bend, and moved into a more modest home near NE Bear Creek Road. From there, he’s launching what he calls his “comeback,” starting with a new website, new inventions, a still-under-wraps entry he hopes to debut at the Bend Pet Parade on July 4 and a similarly secretive idea for a space-based spectacle that can be seen all over the world.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2009, Walker wants to serve as a living example of how creativity and mental illness often go hand in hand. He wants his rise and fall — and he hopes, his next rise — to be a source of inspiration for others struggling with similar issues.

“Hey, look, I’m still here. A lot of people wouldn’t be if they’d gone through a lot of the things I have in the past,” he said. “There’s a lot of sadness, but I still have hope.”

Before he was Rocketguy, Walker was a toy inventor who’d seen more failure than success until, much to his surprise, the toy he called the Light Chaser became a hit.

Walker readily admits the toy that allowed him to chase his boyhood dream of being an astronaut is nothing special.

The Light Chaser isn’t so much a toy as it is a part of a toy, a small motor that spins a series of lighted appendages around the head or torso of a doll or figurine.

Two years after he introduced the Light Chaser, the toy was available in stores but not selling well. In 2000, Disney and Ringling Brothers both began producing Light Chasers featuring their licensed characters, and sales took off. Around $400 million in Light Chasers were sold in just a few years, earning Walker somewhere between $6 million and $7 million.

Walker said the money enabled him to pour millions into developing his rocket and backyard space training center, but it pushed the development of new, practical inventions off to the side. Finally successful, Walker found it was much harder than he’d expected it would be.

“When you live hand to mouth your whole life and you’re dumped that kind of money, you can’t handle it,” he said.

Walker said he traveled to Russia, dropping tens of thousands of dollars on cosmonaut training and flights in a MIG jet in preparation for his planned space flight. Upon learning of a solar eclipse coming up in four days, he flew to Zambia, observed the eight-minute event and turned around and came home.

He said he bought a $100,000 Mercedes, and three weeks later when he returned to the dealership only intending to pick up a part, he bought a second, $150,000 Mercedes.

At the same time, sales of the Light Chaser were falling, and none of his earlier inventions were providing him much income. He’d married a woman he met in Russia while training for the rocket flight, but he said two months after she came back to Oregon with him, she walked out.

Though he can now chuckle at how his divorce cost him just $500 and a car, at the time, it was the trigger that sent him into a multiyear downward spiral.

“Quite honestly, it was the emotional trauma of this last effort at having a family falling apart, and I fell apart,” he said.

With the benefit of hindsight, Walker recognizes the periods when he’d spend days on end immersed in one of his projects were manic episodes stemming from his then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

Medications have left him too rattled to work, so he’s tried to embrace his condition and looked to find something of himself in the lives of other famously creative yet troubled people, men like Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams.

The combination of bipolar disorder and the dyslexia and ADHD he’s dealt with since childhood is a mixed blessing, Walker said. It’s made him both “a creative genius” and “a nutcase,” he said, a bottomless well of ideas who realizes he’s ill-suited to bring them to market himself.

“The doctors said it’s almost as if I don’t have a left hemisphere. I‘m like two right hemispheres — all creativity, all imagination, all invention but no organization, no logic, no nothing as far as record-keeping. The day-to-day things you need to do to run a business would just not work if I was trying to do that.”

As he’s managed to come to terms with his emotional state, Walker has started inventing again. On a tour of his shop and home Friday, he showed off many but not all of his latest projects.

There’s the “Painter’s Pal,” a vest of sorts that uses a rubber bladder filled with paint and a dispenser that wets the wearer’s brush with just enough paint to do the job.

He’s also developed the “Versa Sprayer,” a walk-behind, three-wheeled rig for applying agricultural chemicals that uses the movement of the sprayer to keep the tank properly pressurized.

He’s built exercise machines, a dryer for dogs and a six-shot home defense handgun with built-in electronics to record a video of the interaction and allow the user to call and talk to police through the gun.

And then there are the rockets.

Though Walker is no longer looking to launch himself skyward, his workshop is full of rockets of all kinds, from toys to a 15-foot prototype he believes could deliver a private space tourist to 70,000 feet for as little as $10,000.

Looking back on his Rocketguy days, Walker said he most misses the letters and emails he used to receive after a high-profile media appearance. People would send him messages of encouragement, or tell him how his dream of traveling to the edge of space made pursuing their own dreams seem more achievable.

As someone who struggled to fit in as a child and never experienced the social aspects of a 9-to-5 job, the letters and emails were Walker’s way of connecting with others, and he made a point of answering every one personally.

Despite its ultimate failure, the millions of dollars spent and the emotional anguish that followed, Walker still remembers being Rocketguy as one of the high points of his life.

“There were so many positive things that came out of that project,” he said. “Even though I never launched it, I would never go back and change things.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0387, shammers@bendbulletin.com

Coming soon

Walker’s new website will be at brianwalkerinventor.com.