Rocket man rejects Iranian offer to develop his pulsejet

By SCOTT MacLEOD

An engineer who made global headlines while building a cruise missile in his garage has spurned an offer from an Iranian firm to develop his jet engines.

Tokoroa's Bruce Simpson said the firm was linked to the aerospace and missile industries. He also had nibbles from Lebanon, Pakistan and China.

"I contacted the SIS, who promptly arrived on my doorstep without even asking for directions," Mr Simpson said on his website. "They advised that it was most certainly not a sensible thing to do."

Mr Simpson instead signed a heads of agreement with a United States firm that would have set up a research and development plant in the Waikato.

But the deal was scuttled on Monday because Mr Simpson was bankrupted by the Inland Revenue Department over unpaid taxes.

A bitter Mr Simpson said the department was stupid to quash a deal that would have let the tax be paid.

The venture would have reaped cash "hundreds of times the value of the outstanding debt".

The department's Alison Welch rejected the claims, saying the Commissioner of Inland Revenue and members of Parliament had looked at the case.

Mr Simpson, 49, is an engineer, website developer and software technician who spent four years perfecting his "X-Jet", similar to the pulse-jets that powered Germany's V-1 missiles in World War II.

His GPS-guided missile has a normal pulse-jet and is meant to fly 160km with a 10kg warhead.

Six weeks ago, Mr Simpson advertised for volunteers to help with a test flight, but yesterday said the missile was no longer in his possession.

Its whereabouts would be "kept secret until an appropriate time".

The Defence Force refused to help with the test-flight, in which the 640km/h missile would have flown a square course with 10km legs.

Mr Simpson took just 10 hours to make a pulse-jet out of trash on the British television show Scrapheap Challenge.

The episode, seen by millions of viewers in England in October and the United States last month, showed Mr Simpson's team of Navy sailors fix the jet to a kart which hit 64km/h, beating a rival team.

Scrapheap co-host Lisa Rogers said it was "the most astounding bit of engineering I've ever seen on the show".