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Flat-Earther's Steam-Powered Rocket Lofts Him 1,875 Feet Up Into Mojave Desert (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: "Mad" Mike Hughes, the rocket man who believes the Earth is flat, propelled himself about 1,875 feet into the air 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, Calif. The launch in the sparsely populated desert town about 150 miles 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. 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.
Of course there was video. VIdeo of the launch and video of paramedics extracting him from the crashed spacecraft. More than one video, too. The main one was shot by an AP cameraman. All sorts of witnesses, too.
Where did you get the idea there were no videos or photos?
https://gizmodo.com/at-long-la...
You are welcome on my lawn.
and yet from there he could have just taken the gondola in Palm Springs up to the top of Mt San Jacinto and gotten almost 10x higher than he did. Or hike to the top of Mt Whitney, and just look out to the east.
Or for about the same altitude, just go to Chicago, go to the top of Sears Tower. Tgen explain how on a clear day one can see over to Michigan, and reconcile why one cannot see it from Lake Shore Drive.
I forget which one it was, but knowledge that the Earth is round goes back to the Ancient Greeks. As I recall, the story goes something along the lines of a guy walked from Greece to Egypt, and along the way he would put sticks in the ground and measure the shadow they cast at specific times of day. Based on their length and direction, you can deduce that the Earth must be round, or at least curved in a convex way.
You can also apply some simple logic. Why is it objects disappear over the horizon as you get further away from them? If the Earth were flat, they should be visible at basically every distance.
Another logical way to look at this: Assume the Earth really is flat. What would people have to gain by claiming it was round? To perpetuate this "myth" for so long, there would have to be one hell of a payoff for someone. So who would stand to gain, and how would perpetuating the idea that the Earth is round achieve that goal?
A third logical way to look at it: Assume the Earth is flat. What keeps the water in the oceans from spilling over the edge? How is it that we have cargo ships, planes, etc, that traverse the Pacific Ocean between mainland Asia and the US, and at the same time, you have planes, trains, and automobiles that go between land masses on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean into mainland Asia? If the Earth was flat, that would be impossible. One of those two groups should have reached the edge of the Earth if it was indeed flat. Why do toilets flush in the opposite direction in places like South America and Australia? Why are the seasons reversed between North and South America?
A fourth way, is to get a telescope and look at some of the other planets within our solar system. How many examples of flat planets do you see? Galileo was able to chart the moons of Jupiter with a telescope probably about as powerful as a cheap pair of binoculars. For a relatively paltry sum (particularly compared to what this guy's contraption likely cost) you can get a telescope that will let you see much more detail than the people of antiquity who first discovered the planets. Hell, you can just look at the moon and see it's round with the naked eye on a clear night. Even if you think there's some kind of conspiracy where telescope makers all "fix" their wares to make things appear round (setting aside that the engineering required is basically impossible with only optical lenses), you should be able to trust what you can see with your unaugmented eye. Then there is physics, where you can demonstrate that any object that reaches a critical mass will collapse in on itself and form a sphere.
The flat earth idea really just falls flat -- happy coincidence on the pun -- in a number of really obvious ways. The above is just what I can come up with off the top of my head. I'm sure there are hundreds of other ways to prove it.
Steam is what you get when you burn hydrogen containing molecules. Space X flies with CO2 and Steam.