“NUTTERS” and “flat-earthers”…

[kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

This man is about to launch himself in his
homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat

Goodbye, cold, flat Earth.

By AVI SELK | 1:51PM EST — Tuesday, November 21, 2017


Mike Hughes and his steam-powered rocket constructed out of salvaged parts on a five-acre property that he leases in Apple Valley, California.
— Photograph: Waldo Stakes/Mad Mike Hughes/Associated Press.

SEEKING TO PROVE that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Mike Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes's ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

“It'll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday's flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I'm really behind the eight ball.”

That said, Hughes isn't a totally unproven engineer. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results.

“Okay, Waldo. 3 … 2 … 1!” someone yells in a test fire video from 2012.

There's a brief hiss of boiling water, then … nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a thick cloud of steam belches out toward the camera.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Arizona.

As seen in a YouTube video, the flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning from the remains of the rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.

And the 2014 flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday's mile-long attempt.

And it was based on round-Earth technology.

Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.

It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign — “From Garage to Outer Space!” — that mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts, and was themed after a NASCAR event.

“We want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,” Hughes said, standing in his Apple Valley, California, living room, which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.

“They have not put a man in space yet,” Hughes said. “There are 20 different space agencies here in America, and I'm the last person that's put a man in a rocket and launched it.”

He compared himself to Evel Knievel, as he promised to launch himself from a California racetrack — the first step on his steam-powered leap toward space.


Mike Hughes plans to launch his rocket on Saturday over the ghost town of Amboy, California, at a speed of roughly 500 miles per hour.
— Photograph: Mad Mike Hughes/Associated Press.

The Kickstarter raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.

Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to fly over Texas in a “SkyLimo”. But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty of funding his dreams on a chauffeur's meager salary.

A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community Web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.

“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I'm a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”

The host sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket, he noted, whereas astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.

“John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons,” Hughes agreed. “Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.”

The host talked of “Elon Musk's fake reality,” and Hughes talked of “anti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.” After half an hour of this, the host told his 300-some listeners to back Hughes's exploration of space.

While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disc ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.

What's beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.

“We need an individual who's not compromised by the government,” the host told Hughes. “And you could be that man.”

A flat-Earth GoFundMe subsequently raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.

By November, the Associated Press reported, his $20,000 rocket had a fancy coat of Rust-Oleum paint and “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” inscribed on the side.

While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the Associated Press reported, Hughes will be making adjustments right up to Saturday's launch.

He won't be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And even if it's a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disc.

“It's scary as hell,” Hughes told the Associated Press. “But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

This is true. Yet some will try to live to see its edges.

• Avi Selk is an American-Canadian nomad. He reported for the Dallas Morning News from 2009 until December 2016, when he joined the general assignment desk at The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• Kyrie Irving's flat-Earth beliefs now the bane of middle-school teachers' existence

• Kyrie Irving believes the Earth is flat. It is not.

• A Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theory

• The explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theories

• VIDEO: Watch SpaceX's greatest explosions, courtesy of Elon Musk

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/21/this-man-is-about-to-launch-himself-in-his-homemade-rocket-to-prove-the-earth-is-flat

[Dave Homewood]

Haha, this is pure gold.

[ZacYates]

Like I said to a friend who sent me the link, at least he dies doing what he loved.

[Dave Homewood]

But just watch, when he kills himself his family will blame NASA and say they were protecting their secrets.

[johnnyfalcon]

He's gonna prove this...from an altitude of 1800'??!! What have I missed each time I've gone that high (just above circuit height) in a Cessna? Scrooge! When you gave me lessons at Dairy Flat why didn't you point out this very obvious conspiracy to me? Or was that while you had me "flying" under the hood...? Ah, I see, so you're part of it too!

[kiwithrottlejockey]

The latest update....

---

from The Washington Post....

A flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade
rocket just hit a speed bump

“It's still happening,” Mike Hughes said of his plan to “prove” that Earth is flat.

By AMY B. WANG and AVI SELK | 2:28PM EST — Friday, November 24, 2017

A CALIFORNIA MAN who planned to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a homemade scrap-metal rocket — in an effort to prove that Earth is flat — said he is postponing the experiment after he couldn't get permission from a federal agency to conduct it on public land.

Instead, Mike Hughes said the launch will take place sometime next week on private property, albeit still in Amboy, California, an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert along historic Route 66.

“It's still happening. We're just moving it three miles down the road,” Hughes told The Washington Post on Friday. “This is what happens anytime you have to deal with any kind of government agency.”

Hughes claimed the Bureau of Land Management said he couldn't launch his rocket as planned on Saturday in Amboy. He claimed the federal agency had given him verbal permission more than a year ago, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

A BLM spokeswoman said its local field office had no record of speaking with Hughes and that he had not applied for the necessary special recreation permit to hold an event on public land.

“Someone from our local office reached out to him after seeing some of these news articles [about the launch], because that was news to them,” BLM spokeswoman Samantha Storms said.

Representatives from the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Hughes said he had originally intended to arrive in Amboy on Wednesday to start setting up the rocket. The BLM's denial, along with some technical difficulties — a motor in his modified motor home quit working for a day — threw a wrench into his plans, according to Hughes.

“I don't see [the launch] happening until about Tuesday, honestly,” he said. “It takes three days to set up…. You know, it's not easy because it's not supposed to be easy.”

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof that it's a disk we all live on.

“It'll shut the door on this ball Earth,” Hughes said in a flight fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I'm really behind the eight ball.”

That said, Hughes isn't a totally unproven engineer. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results.

“Okay, Waldo. 3 … 2 … 1!” someone yells in a test-fire video from 2012.

There's a brief hiss of boiling water, then … nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a thick cloud of steam belches out toward the camera.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Arizona.

As seen in a YouTube video, the flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning, from the remains of the rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.

The 2014 flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday's mile-long attempt.

And it was based on round-Earth technology.

Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.

It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign — “From Garage to Outer Space!” — that mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts and was themed after a NASCAR event.

“We want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,” Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, California, living room, which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.

“They have not put a man in space yet,” Hughes said. “There are 20 different space agencies here in America, and I'm the last person that's put a man in a rocket and launched it.” Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch himself from a California racetrack that year as the first step in his steam-powered leap toward space.

The Kickstarter raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.

Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to fly over Texas in a “SkyLimo”. But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty of funding his dreams on a chauffeur's meager salary.

A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community Web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.

“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I'm a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”

The host sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket, he noted, whereas astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.

“John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons,” Hughes agreed. “Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.”

The host talked of “Elon Musk's fake reality,” and Hughes talked of “anti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.” After half an hour of this, the host told his 300-some listeners to back Hughes’s exploration of space.

While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.

What’s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.

“We need an individual who's not compromised by the government,” the host told Hughes. “And you could be that man.”

A flat-Earth GoFundMe effort subsequently raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.

By November, the Associated Press reported, his $20,000 rocket had a coat of Rust-Oleum paint and “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” inscribed on the side.

While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the Associated Press reported, Hughes will be making adjustments right up to the launch.

But he won't be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And if it's a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disk. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into space.

“It's scary as hell,” Hughes told the Associated Press. “But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

This is true. And yet some hope to live to see its edges.

• Amy B Wang is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.

• Avi Selk is an American-Canadian nomad. He reported for the Dallas Morning News from 2009 until December 2016, when he joined the general assignment desk at The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• VIDEO: This man hopes his homemade rocket will prove the earth is flat

• Kyrie Irving believes Earth is flat. It is not.

• A Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theory

• The explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theories

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/24/a-flat-earthers-plan-to-launch-himself-in-a-homemade-rocket-just-hit-a-speed-bump

[kiwithrottlejockey]

The thought entered my head the other day when I first saw the story at The Washington Post that perhaps this Mike Hughes chap could be an Evel Knievel wannabe turned conman who has managed to sucker flat-earthers into financing his thrill-seeking stunts. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.

And looking through the reader comments posted in reply to the updated article at The Washington Post, it appears I'm not the only person with that suspicion. Several people have raised the same idea that the man could be a con-artist who has pulled the wool over flat-earthers and taken their money.

[ZacYates]

If he's just a con-man managing to rob those idiots, he has my full support. An excellent idea!

[johnnyfalcon]

I thought exactly the same thing. My support too (non-financially that is)

[flyinkiwi]

1800 feet huh? Can't really see the curvature of the earth from that altitude. I bet people are lining up to sue when things go pear shaped.

[Dave Homewood]

He'd have been bettr off using the money to buy an airline ticket, he'd get a better view from 34,000 feet.

[johnnyfalcon]

Nov 28, 2017 10:31:14 GMT 12 flyinkiwi said:

1800 feet huh? Can't really see the curvature of the earth from that altitude. I bet people are lining up to sue when things go pear shaped.

And there's his PROOF! "Look: No curve"!

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Well....this nutter is definitely trying very hard to win a “Darwin Award” with his rocketry antics.

---

from The Washington Post....

Self-taught rocket scientist blasts off into California sky

By PAT GRAHAM and MICHAEL BALSAMO | 9:56PM EDT — Saturday, March 24, 2018


In this March 6, 2018, file photo, “Mad” Mike Hughes reacts after the decision to scrub another launch attempt of his rocket near Amboy, California. The self-taught rocket scientist
who believes the Earth is flat propelled himself about 1,000 feet into the air before a hard-landing in the Mojave Desert that left him injured on Saturday, March 24, 2018.
Hughes tells the Associated Press that he injured his back but is otherwise fine after Saturday's launch near Amboy, California.
— Photograph: James Quigg/Mojave Desert Daily Press/Associated Press.

LOS ANGELES He finally went up — just like the self-taught rocket scientist always pledged he would.

He came back down in one piece, too — a little dinged up and his steam-powered vessel a little cracked up.

Still, mission accomplished for a guy more daredevil than engineer, who drew more comparisons to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote from his critics than he did to iconic stunt man Evel Knievel.

“Mad” Mike Hughes, the rocket man who believes the Earth is flat, propelled himself about 1,875 feet into the air on Saturday before a hard landing in the Mojave Desert. He told the Associated Press that outside of an aching back he's fine after the launch near Amboy, California.

“Relieved,” he said after being checked out by paramedics. “I'm tired of people saying I chickened out and didn't build a rocket. I'm tired of that stuff. I manned up and did it.”

The launch in the desert town — about 200 miles (321.85 kilometers) east of Los Angeles — was originally scheduled in November. It was scrubbed several times due to logistical issues with the Bureau of Land Management and mechanical problems that kept popping up.

The 61-year-old limo driver converted a mobile home into a ramp and modified it to launch from a vertical angle so he wouldn't fall back to the ground on public land. For months he's been working on overhauling his rocket in his garage.

It looked like Saturday might be another in a string of cancellations, given that the wind was blowing and his rocket was losing steam. Ideally, they wanted it at 350 psi for maximum thrust, but it was dropping to 340.

“I told Mike we could try to keep charging it up and get it hotter,” said Waldo Stakes, who's been helping Hughes with his endeavor. “He said, ‘No’.”

Sometime after 3 p.m. PDT, and without a countdown, Hughes' rocket soared into the sky.

Hughes reached a speed that Stakes estimated to be around 350 mph before pulling his parachute. Hughes was dropping too fast, though, and he had to deploy a second one. He landed with a thud and the rocket's nose broke in two places like it was designed to do.

“This thing wants to kill you 10 different ways,” said Hughes, who had an altimeter in his cockpit to measure his altitude. “This thing will kill you in a heartbeat.”

“Am I glad I did it? Yeah. I guess. I'll feel it in the morning. I won't be able to get out of bed. At least I can go home and have dinner and see my cats tonight.”



He got permission to launch on the land owned by Albert Okura, who bought Amboy in 2005 for $435,000. Okura was in attendance and said the event lasted about three to four minutes. The rocket landed about 1,500 feet from the launch ramp, Stakes said.

“Mike branded us as ‘Rocket Town’,” Okura said. “It was amazing.”

This has been quite an undertaking for Hughes, who lives in Apple Valley, California. He's seen a flurry of reaction to his plans, with detractors labeling him a crackpot for planning the launch in a homemade contraption and his belief that the world is flat.

Some naysayers have posted things like “He'll be fine” with a picture of Wile E. Coyote strapped to a rocket.

“I hope he doesn't blow something up,” retired NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger said as Hughes' plans captured widespread attention. Linenger orbited the globe more than 2,000 times during four months in 1997. “Rocketry, as our private space companies found out, isn't as easy as it looks.”

Hughes often sparred with his critics on social media leading up to the launch, through Facebook comments and a 12-minute video addressed to his doubters. He's always maintained that his mission isn't to prove the Earth is flat.

“Do I believe the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee? I believe it is,” he said. “Do I know for sure? No. That's why I want to go up in space.”

That's his project for down the road. He wants to build a “Rockoon”, a rocket that is carried into the atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and lit. This rocket would take Hughes about 68 miles up.

He has a documentary crew following him around to record his ambition, with a planned release in August.

This was actually the second time he's constructed and launched a rocket. He said he jumped on a private property in Winkelman, Arizona, on January 30, 2014, and traveled 1,374 feet. He collapsed after that landing and needed three days to recover.

But there wasn't any footage of him climbing into the craft, leading some to question whether he even took off.

This one was going to be shown online through Noize TV.

“My story really is incredible,” Hughes said. “It's got a bunch of story lines — the garage-built thing. I'm an older guy. It's out in the middle of nowhere, plus the Flat Earth. The problem is it brings out all the nuts also, people questioning everything. It's the downside of all this.”

His future plans are simple: Fill out the paperwork to run for governor.

“This is no joke,” Hughes said. “I want to do it.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• Associated Press news story.

www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/self-taught-rocket-scientist-blasts-off-into-california-sky/2018/03/24/b5927c16-2fcf-11e8-8dc9-3b51e028b845_story.html

---

Some links to earlier stories I didn't get around to posting into this thread....



from The Washington Post....

• Can this flat-Earther's long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out. (January 25, 2018)

• A flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn’t even ignite. (February 06, 2018)

[markrogers]

Wow! Quite a spectacular launch!

[kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

An amateur rocket-maker finally launched himself off Earth.
Now to prove it's flat …

Mike Hughes, a 61-year-old limousine driver and rocket-maker, propelled
himself about 1,875 feet above the Mojave Desert on Saturday.

By KRISTINE PHILLIPS and AVI SELK | 2:11PM EDT — Sunday, March 25, 2018


Mike Hughes's homemade rocket launches near Amboy, California, on Saturday. The self-taught rocket scientist, who believes Earth is flat, propelled himself about 1,875 feet
into the air before a hard landing in the Mojave Desert. — Photograph: Matt Hartman/Associated Press.

MIKE HUGHES, a California man who is most known for his belief that the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee, finally blasted off into the sky in a steam-powered rocket he had built himself.

The 61-year-old limo driver and daredevil-turned-rocket-maker soared about 1,875 feet above the Mojave Desert on Saturday afternoon, the Associated Press reported. Hughes's white-and-green rocket, bearing the words “FLAT EARTH”, propelled vertically about 3 p.m. Pacific time and reached a speed of about 350 mph, Waldo Stakes, who has been helping Hughes, told the Associated Press. Hughes deployed two parachutes while landing, the second one just moments before he plopped down not far from his launching point.

A video shows that the whole endeavor, from the moment his rocket went up to the moment he landed, lasted about a minute.



The vertical launch, which happened without a countdown more than 200 miles east of Los Angeles, came amid growing skepticism that Hughes would ever lift himself off. The launch had been postponed multiple times, partly because Hughes said he couldn't get permission from a federal agency to conduct it on public land.

After he landed on Saturday, Hughes told the Associated Press that he was “relieved” but that he expected to feel the physical toll of it all the next day.

“Am I glad I did it? Yeah. I guess. I'll feel it in the morning. I won't be able to get out of bed,” he said. “At least I can go home and have dinner and see my cats tonight.”

He also said he'd been frustrated with assumptions that he “chickened out,” so he “manned up and did it.”

Hughes had been on a mission to prove that the Earth is flat and that NASA astronauts such as John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were merely paid actors performing in front of a computer-generated image of a round globe. His previous failed attempts, as well as the successful one on Saturday, are all part of his ultimate goal to propel himself at least 52 miles above Earth by the end of the year — and to prove once and for all that the planet is flat.


On March 6, self-taught rocket scientist Mike Hughes began repairing a steam leak after scrubbing a launch attempt near Amboy, California.
— Photograph: James Quigg/Mojave Desert Daily Press/Associated Press.

Hughes had initially planned to launch his rocket in November, but he postponed it, claiming the Bureau of Land Management told him he couldn't do so on federal land. A spokeswoman for the agency, however, said its field office has no record of speaking with Hughes.

The launch was postponed again later that month, as Hughes moved his launching point to a private property near Amboy, California, an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert.

“It's still happening. We're just moving it three miles down the road,” Hughes told The Washington Post in late November, as he hauled the rocket to the new spot. “I don't see [the launch] happening until about Tuesday, honestly. It takes three days to set up…. You know, it's not easy because it's not supposed to be easy.”

In February, Hughes finally attempted his flight, but his rocket didn't ignite. He blamed technical difficulties.

To Hughes's credit, he has shown some skills in building rockets. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results. He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Arizona.


Mike Hughes is carried on a stretcher after his rocket landed in the Mojave Desert on Saturday. — Photograph: Matt Hartman/Associated Press.

According to the Associated Press, Hughes's hard landing on Saturday left him injured, though it is unclear what type of injuries he suffered. Photos show paramedics carrying Hughes on a stretcher and into an ambulance.

Also among Hughes's plans — aside from trying to get to space — is to run for governor.

“This is no joke,” he told the Associated Press. “I want to do it.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• Kristine Phillips is a member of The Washington Post's general assignment team. Before joining The Post in 2016, she covered criminal justice, courts and legal affairs at the Indianapolis Star, where she was part of a team that won state awards for breaking news coverage. She also worked for the Oregonian and the Orange County Register, where she covered crime, local government and education. Born and raised in the Philippines, she moved to the United States as a teenager in 2006.

• Avi Selk is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post. He worked for many years in factories and service industries — experiences he values. He later graduated from the University of Texas at Austin's journalism program in 2009, then worked for the Dallas Morning News until 2016, when The Post hired him.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• A flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn't even ignite.

• A flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bump

• This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/25/an-amateur-rocket-maker-finally-launched-himself-off-earth-now-to-prove-its-flat

[Brett]

Who would have expected this???

Daredevil ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes killed in rocket crash outside Barstow

By David Zahniser | Staff Writer

Feb. 22, 2020 |8:43 PM

Mike Hughes, the self-made engineer who billed himself as the “world’s greatest daredevil,” was killed Saturday outside Barstow during a launch of a homemade rocket gone wrong, his publicist confirmed.

Hughes, who went by the nickname “Mad Mike,” was captured on video as he rode a rocket into the sky, failed to activate a parachute and then plummeted to his death, said Darren Shuster, his public relations representative.

The daredevil had been hoping to use Saturday’s launch to reach a height of 5,000 feet, according to a post on Space.com. Instead, dozens of people watched in horror as he fell to earth, said Justin Chapman, a freelance writer who told The Times that he attended the launch.

“Everyone was stunned. They didn’t know what to do,” said Chapman, who had been working on a profile of Hughes. “He landed about a half a mile away from the launch pad.”

An official with the San Bernardino County coroner’s office said she expected there would be a “lengthy” investigation into the incident. “We have no facts at this point,” she said.

Saturday’s launch was supposed to be featured in “Homemade Astronauts,” a series on the Science Channel, according to Discovery.com. The series followed people looking to “explore the final frontier on limited budgets,” the company said.

Chapman said he believes the daredevil had been knocked unconscious during the launch, which took place in the desert south of Barstow, off Highway 247. “The parachute ripped off at launch,” he said. “So the rocket went straight up in an arc and came straight down.”

None of Hughes’ backup parachutes activated, either, Chapman said.

Hughes, 64, had been performing stunts for decades, making long-distance jumps in a limousine and, in more recent years, riding in his own homemade rockets. In 2018, his rocket soared nearly 1,900 feet into the air, landing in the Mojave Desert.

Before that launch, Hughes told the Associated Press that he believed Earth is flat — or, in his words, “shaped like a Frisbee” — and that he wanted to fly into space to make sure.

Shuster, who did not attend Saturday’s launch, said the flat Earth argument helped drum up publicity and sponsors for Hughes, who made his rockets at his home in Apple Valley.

“I don’t think he believed it,” Shuster said. “He did have some governmental conspiracy theories. But don’t confuse it with that flat Earth thing. That was a PR stunt we dreamed up.”

Other sponsors, such as a New Zealand dating app, later signed on to promote Hughes’ adventures, Shuster said.

Eric Sherwin, spokesman for the San Bernardino County Fire Department, said his agency had neither been alerted in advance that Saturday’s rocket launch was going to take place nor informed of the fatality after it had occurred.

Fire Department officials will look into why they were not told of the crash, Sherwin said. A private company, Desert Ambulance, was on the scene at the time, he added.

“They said they did have a fatality,” Sherwin said. “They pronounced a single person deceased at 1:45 this afternoon.”

Hughes’s DIY rocket-making ventures drew widespread attention, attracting the interest of documentary filmmakers and reality TV producers. His supporters donated money so that their names would appear on his rockets, Shuster said. “He was this generation’s Evel Knievel,” the publicist said, referring to the late daredevil motorcyclist and showman.

“This guy knew he wasn’t going to live till 80. I spent a lot of hours with him,” Shuster added. “He had something in him that compelled himself to push himself further each time.”



If the Earth was flat, I suspect it now has a slight dent in it.

[baronbeeza]

[johnnyfalcon]

Well, I guess he won't do that again... At least he proved that the earth is flat (and hard) where he hit.