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Flat Earther's Homemade Rocket Launcher Breaks Down in His Driveway (desertsun.com)
The Desert Sun has an update on the progress of 61-year-old self-taught rocket scientist 'Mad' Mike Hughes:
A man who believes Earth is flat, and was ready to launch himself from a rocket in California on Saturday afternoon to prove it, has canceled his plans. At least for now. Not having the required federal permits plus mechanical problems with his "motorhome/rocket launcher" forced self-taught rocket scientist "Mad" Mike Hughes to put his experiment on hold. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management "told me they would not allow me to do the event ... at least not at that location," Hughes said in a YouTube announcement, amid international attention over his plans to launch into the "atmosflat."
"It's been very disappointing," he said... "My feeling is that one of the top executives at the Bureau of Land Management called Needles, California, saying... 'What's going on? Who permitted this?'" Hughes said. Plus, as he and his team were preparing to leave Wednesday, the motorhome/rocket launcher broke down in his driveway, he said... His plan is to try again next week.
"It's been very disappointing," he said... "My feeling is that one of the top executives at the Bureau of Land Management called Needles, California, saying... 'What's going on? Who permitted this?'" Hughes said. Plus, as he and his team were preparing to leave Wednesday, the motorhome/rocket launcher broke down in his driveway, he said... His plan is to try again next week.
He hopes someday his rocket will go higher than a building.
Both Mad Mike and the Coyote have been shopping at ACME.
These flying wings can get to 15,000+ feet and are under $10,000 including training. (highest paraglider of any kind was 24,848 feet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Bonus points- you can't see curvature of the earth from that low.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'd like to encourage him, these amateur science projects are bound to encounter stangs from time to time, but on the other hand I don;t want to be complicit in him blowing himself up, so I'm torn...
Nullius in verba
... as he and his team were preparing to leave Wednesday ...
Meaning, his wife, dog, and two grand-kids visiting for Thanksgiving -- all holding globes of the Earth they got at the airport gift shop (and, yes, that includes the dog).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
“I don’t believe in science,” said Hughes, whose main sponsor for the rocket is Research Flat Earth. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”
I can't even ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I was reading that a look at his history shows no belief in a flat earth until he found out he could get some funding out of it.
That's what the globe producing lobby wants you to think.
There's a reason they call it a global conspiracy.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Kind of sums it all up.
Why is Snark Required?
I've read that he did start hanging out with the flat-Earth people AFTER he'd been fundraising for his rocket project.
That would at least have been interesting.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
>"forced self-taught rocket scientist "Mad" Mike "
"scientist", really? Seems like a very odd word to use in a summary explaining he seriously [??] thinks the earth is flat?
Perhaps self-taught mechanic, or self-taught assembler or something.
There is a massive conspiracy to cover up the fact that the earth is flat. That is why secret operatives sent by no other than the United Nations and led by Colonel Kofi Annan personally broke his trailer. Once the truth gets out about what you see when you rocketeer above 300 feet, the world will never be the same again. What is that I hear you say? There are buildings taller than that? Those buildings are only real up to 299 feet. Everything above that is a strikingly realistic hologram. In fact, if you get into an elevator in a very tall building and press the button for the top floor, you are never seen again. They take you out of the elevator on the "extraction floor" at 299 feet, take you to the secret underground United Nations subterranean train station that was secretly built under every tall building 200 years ago, and send you on a one way journey to the edge of the world. What happens when you get there? You get thrown over the edge. Where do you land when they do that? On your ass of course.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
There's a reason they call it a global conspiracy.
Damn straight. Those conspiracy theorists are flat wrong. Good thing there are level headed people in charge.
That's what the globe producing lobby wants you to think.
There's a reason they call it a global conspiracy.
Now that's funny right there!
Sorry Larry
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
So he builds a rocket expected to reach 1,500 feet.... When there is an 11,500 foot mountain 50 miles from Amboy with a trail right to the tippy top.and a 360 degree view of the horizon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Call me crazy but I really don't think this has anything to do with 'flat earth', science or rockets. He got his picture in the paper. End of story.
With no desert
I hope it blows up spectacularly. He'll get a darwin award for sure.
Is on his shoulders
I'm not convinced this guy is really a "flat earther." Apparently, he only started "believing" in it within the last year or so, and after his first failed Kickstarted didn't generate enough backers. Suddenly, he starts advertising his Flat Earth chops and his follow up Kickstarter gets the attention needed for proper funding.
Sounds more like a marketing tactic to me...
Anyway, I'm not trying to call the guy out as some kind of Flat Earth Wannabe or anything, but the media seems really committed to playing right into his hand.
Almost all rockets are steam powered. It's what you get when you burn hydrogen. He may very well have made a perfectly usable rocket.
> A group of idiots and their money are soon parted.
Hmm, good point. Now announcing the newest and hottest pyramid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H blockchain currency, Flatcoin! The Flatcoin algorithm is designed to radically increase the value of the your Flatcoin as California falls off the edge of the flat earth due to glob^H^H^H^Hplatal warming. But wait, there's more! Today only, you can buy your very own solid-state Flatcoin mining rig which is powered by unlimited free energy from nuclear fallout from unsustainable banana farming.* Get yours today before availability is destroyed by returning to prehistoric 2015 and earlier network regulation without network neutrality rules which were ignored for the year and a half they were in effect anyway!
* 120V @ 15A electric service required to harvest free energy.
Brother, the place you're looking for is Black Rock City. You will be welcomed as a hero my friend. Google "burning man" and ask for an artists grant.
He might have hit one of the turtles.
When you can't do something blame the government.
They just want to keep their monopoly on chemical reactions and Newtonian mechanics.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Or stand on a beach and look at the horizon - it clearly curves.
Requiem for the American Dream
I once used an Estes C6-7 to launch a Revell model of a 1966 Thunderbird that belonged to my cousin. We never found the wreckage, so I assume it made it out of the Earth's gravitational field and is probably orbiting the Earth. My cousin was pissed off, but it was either his model Thunderbird or his hamster, so I'm pretty sure he got off easy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I drove through Needles, California back in August when we moved here to the Central Coast from Houston. I can understand why he would want to launch himself into space.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Those can be hacked by Russians looking to spread FUD to Americans. Once they are that high up, they are well within GoldenEye (which was based on a real story btw) style lasers fired from the vicinity of Moscow. The lasers can be used to reprogram the camera to make the earth look like a ball and the sun not be a disc. BeauHD and I discussed this at length.
But doesn't the mapmaking lobby have some counter-influence? Surely they sell a lot more flat maps than globes these days.
Have you read my blog lately?
It's because his driveway is flat. Everyone knows driveways should be round.
Table-ized A.I.
I bet this guy has us all tricked and he is really just trying to win the Darwin Award.
An immediate conclusion of Earth being flat is it having edges. Where these people think that these parts are located and how are they picturing them? It would make much more sense to believe in it being a cube or any other 3D geometry avoiding that 2D limitation of having boundaries/edges/end. You don't even need to ever find such boundaries to understand that they are extremely incompatible with things like seas; or how should seas deal with the edges of the world? Water systematically falling down? To where? And how could seas recover from losing so much water? You might even just look at all what surrounds you to understand that spheres are an extremely common shape in nature, unlikely planes or other 2D forms.
Some people might think that my comment is extremely evident and nobody in their right mind can think that the Earth is flat. I have personally never met a flat-earther, but have seen a relevant amount of (online) ignorance blindly defended/attacked by people who have a similarly bad understanding about what they are attacking/defending; and even becoming extremely aggressive in doing so, true fanatics of what they don't even understand.
When you start replacing adequately understanding something with blind trust in it being in certain way, you enter in the realm of faith/beliefs; it doesn't matter the formal name of that field or how many people (you think that) think the same, all what matters is your (un)willingness to properly understand and behave accordingly (= "don't talk if you don't know"). If you go one step forward in that direction and start trying to impose your views on others and to attack anyone thinking differently than you, you would become a fanatic. I do respect everyone's beliefs, even in-denial attitude regarding what their actual knowledge/contribution is; at least, for as long as they don't become fanatics seriously expecting me to accept their truths. Any personality defined by "I believe in X and am happy with that" is very respect-worthy for me; on the other hand, "things have to be in that way" actions don't deserve any kind of tolerance.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
...considering the intelligence of someone who believes the Earth is flat despite the fact that Eratostenes proved that it was curved in the 3rd Century BC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We'll make great pets
Does he also not believe that airplanes get to 35,000 ft? I mean, why launch yourself a few thousand feet using a steam rocket when you could buy a nice comfy first class ticket and enjoy the view of the curvature from 35,000 ft?
Unless he thinks that a large chunk of the human population (air travelers) is in on the conspiracy.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Crazy round Earth conspiracy theories! The authorities say it's flat, end of discussion. ae911truth dot org
Faith allows one to believe the unbelievable. Indeed that is often the point. The anti-science firestorm we are witnessing is fascinating and somewhat scary, but it is nothing new. The other term for The Dark Ages is The Age of Faith. Truth was defined by a doctrine of authority, not necessarily by evidence. This served the power elite. Then the Church. We now have powerful institutions whose interests often run counter to scientific evidence. So they contrive a doctrine of authority deliberately by bribing and coercing people in authority (pols and preachers) to deny the relevant science. They do so just as the medievalists saw it to their advantage to deny the wisdom of the ancients because it threatened their temporal authority. The Ancient Greeks knew the earth was a sphere and Eratosthenes even calculated exactly how big it was. (Paradoxically elements within the church preserved the knowledge cast aside elsewhere. )
There will always be Flat Earthers in a literal as well as a figurative sense. Science demands we let go of preconceptions to interpret evidence. Some people see a flat earth stretching out before them on a beach holiday and perhaps cannot let go of their preconceptions despite evidence that their intuition is not the whole picture. Others, like scam artist Mad Mike, see their own interests and truth is of no account to them. Others stand up and are open to new ideas.
Isaac Newton was reluctantly willing to forgo the Lucasian Chair in mathematics because he would not accept ordination as an Anglican priest, which would have required him to accept the trinity mystery -- which as a mathematician of sublime genius he would not do. Ordination was then a requirement for a Cambridge fellowship. King Charles II made an exception for Newton who had made a good case for himself. Score one for Science. As for Mad MIke? Well, clearly he wants to live to spend his skim.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Turtles..all the way down...
I just got done polishing and shining up his Darwin Award too...
Are you saying his rocket escaped the Earth's gravity badly?
Ezekiel 23:20
That's what the globe producing lobby wants you to think. There's a reason they call it a global conspiracy.
You could almost call it Big Globe...
Ezekiel 23:20
No Darwin award for you!
This time.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Map-making lobby ARE the globe producing lobby.
A globe is nothing but a 3D map. And a map is nothing but a projection of a surface of a sphere onto a flat plane.
Clever way to hide in plane sight, isn't it not?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life" - Frank Zappa
I can only imagine light as mini humans, trip and face planting themselves on the floor. When they got up, the ships set sail, so the ships are gone.