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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.
Shame on you. If "Mad" Mike Hughes had connected 1000 Raspberry Pis and 1000 Geforce 1080s into a Beowulf cluster in order to mine something called "cryptocurrency" which will replace all the world's currencies, you'd be cheering and calling him the second coming of Notch or some shit.
This guy sat down and designed and built a homemade rocket and launchpad. He's 100 times the nerd you are.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That doesn't matter. None of the flat earth stuff matters. Columbus thought he was sailing to India.
Columbus was a bit loopy thinking he could reach India, this dude is completely bonkers, there's no comparison.
"Mad" Mike Hughes embodies the real American spirit. He had a dream and he put his life on the line for it and shot himself into the air on a homemade goddamn rocket. It's the unifying concept of Westward, Ho! except he was already in California and couldn't go West any more, so he turned a goddamn mobile home into a goddamn launch pad.
Jesus, if you guys can't see how magnificent that is, your souls have been hollowed out.
I'll give him full props for going through with it, I thought the whole rocket thing was a scam. The fact he actually built a rocket and launched himself into the sky is an awesome example of determination and ingenuity.
But he's still loopier than a bag of yarn.
I stole this Sig
Yes, but in a way, doesn't that make the story even more inspiring?
I don't know what's happened to so many Slashdot commenters who can't see beyond the mundane. Has the world beaten you down so much? "Mad" Mike Hughes has just pulled off one of the great "hold my beer" moments in history and you're pissing and moaning about it. (not you, quantaman. I think you can see a little bit of the beauty in what this crazy sonofabitch just did.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think he recently became a flat earther, so your statement about not being a real flat farther might be truer than you intended
He did. From an article posted last November:
Still, Hughes converted to the flat-Earth belief recently, shortly after his first fundraising campaign for the rocket earned just $310 of its $150,000 goal. His second campaign, this time posted after his conversion and with the support of the flat-Earth community, succeeded in hitting its $7,875 goal.
When dealing with flat earthers, attempting to use logic tends to backfire. It may seem obvious to you that "falling off the edge" is the best way to get in to space, they have argumentation about why no edge has been found. In general I expect that any given fact can be countered by fiction you cannot immediately disprove except by using evidence generated by conspiracists, such as, a globe.
For example, and I warn you that the rabbit hole here is real, they believe the earth is a disc, surrounded by a giant ice wall that we call "Antarctica", beyond which no one has passed. I suppose it was constructed by Bran the Builder, and no doubt contains the shoggoths documented in Lovecraft's xenobiology textbook "At The Mountains of Madness".
I'm not making (some of) this up:
https://wiki.tfes.org/Frequent...