Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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...