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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.
This dude is a fucking inspiration.
"Mad" Mike Hughes, I salute you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
His big mistake was burning pine in the firebox. Next time, a longer-burning hardwood like well-seasoned hickory will improve the specific impulse of his Engine For Raising Aeronauts By Fire. I commend him for trying this approach for high aerial flight and not simply giving up after learning that Czar Nicholas had cornered the entire supply of cavorite he had intended to buy on the London commodity exchange.
I also recommend that should he achieve high altitude, he thoroughly seal his gondola with oakum and gutta-percha, to prevent the escape of too much air.
I installed a 24' diameter pool one summer. I had to flatten a 24' circle of it so at least that much is flat.
FWIW he beat both SpaceX and Blue Origin to a manned rocket launch.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You would vote for a guy because he showed the wherewithal to build a steam rocket and survive it? This is your job interview for political representation?
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
Do you see him get in? _no_.
Do we have any evidence that the rocket was not simply pulled up by a cable? _no_. There is a close-up shot where a cable could easily have been hidden, and a long distance shot that is very clearly made on a computer. Just look at that horizon! Are we supposed to be living at the bottom of a bowl?
And it's not even very good special effects, but I guess that's what you get for a home-grown production... Just look at that puny steam cloud. Is that supposed to be lifting an entire rocket?
Let's call it what it is: a fraud.
Steam is what you get when you burn hydrogen containing molecules. Space X flies with CO2 and Steam.
I start to understand how something like Schwarzenegger could become governor in your state...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sorry, why should we be bothering to work out how to prove it to him? That's up to him, if he wants to go against the entirety of established science - with all their own proofs and evidence - for the last few thousand years.
Flat-earth nonsense is literally predating civilisation. Everyone since has known that it's not flat, nobody in their right mind in even the 14th Century was thinking "Oh, the world is entirely flat". The Ancient Greeks knew it - and could prove it.
It doesn't need any complicated tools, experience, mathematics or intellect to prove it in a matter of seconds. And the more time we waste celebrating and legitimising idiocy like this, the more pathetically sad I am for humanity.
Want to prove it? Buy a round the world ticket and look out the window. You don't need to see curvature of the Earth (though that's easily done) in order to prove that the world isn't a flat plane. Unless you think somehow that the (round) Sun and Moon both circle us perfectly, spend half the day hiding underneath that flat plane, yet always appear from the East no matter where you are on the planet and for some reason the MIDDLE of the planet is closer / warmer, not East vs West.
These people are literally the biggest fools I've ever encountered. It would be ironically funny if someone had suggested this in the 1700's or something, but they still would have been laughed at. To think that they BELIEVE this stuff is worse than anything I can imagine. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has more evidence than this tosh.
Let's please just stop giving them any kind of credence that they are susceptible to "just the right piece of logical thinking, if only we could explain it" but continue laughing at them for their ignorance.
That's already been explained by them. Light gets "tired" on long distances and "falls down" to earth, that's why it looks like the ship disappears behind the horizon. And I have to give it to them, if you ignore the rest of physics, it would actually explain the observation.
That's how most of their "proofs" work. They come up with something that explains the current problem at hand, completely ignoring that it might create a problem with explaining something else (like in this case how other light sources won't work in their scenario if light actually behaved that way). That's not the problem right now, so we don't have to explain it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He went up 570 meters. Five hundred seventy meters.
For comparison: A Sopwith Camel, an airplane of the first world war, from a hundred years ago, had a service ceiling of about 5,791 meters. Approximately ten times the altitude this goofball reached. If his goal was to prove flat earth, he sure chose a poor way. ANY plane he could build out of plywood and cloth (like aforementioned Camel, which was not that much more than exactly this) would take him higher.
And since he obviously is not dumb (another reason why I can't picture him as a flat earther), my conclusion is that he's trolling flat earthers and duping them into giving him money for his stunts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually you see him entering the rocket.
You watch the wrong movies.
Do we have any evidence that the rocket was not simply pulled up by a cable? ... however if you see the launch, you see that the sky is clear ... where should the cable be coming from? From a low orbit space craft?
There can not be evidence for a negative
Let's call it what it is: a fraud.
Yeah, lets call you what you are: and idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
To believe that this man believes the earth is flat is as absurd as believing that the earth is flat. He pretends to believe it for purposes of self-publicity.
Last time I checked /. was an international website (besides CA/UK/AU and NZ have long finished metrication), so why do I keep seeing imperial units here?
Last time I checked, it was an American website, owned by an American company based in NYC, and because we're imperialists.
Just another day in Paradise
Sigh. Really? We're going to do this?
No they don't require travel. People couldn't travel anywhere near as simply as we can, back in the Ancient era.
One only needs to get an answer that works only if the world is round, that's all. Stand on a cliff. See further out to sea than at the bottom of the cliff, but not to infinity (or any reasonable approximation). Ships and oil rigs and wind turbines at sea? You can't see the bottom of them, if they are far enough away. Shouldn't happen on a flat earth. You should see all of them or they should all too far away enough to see. They shouldn't have the bottoms chopped off unless the Earth is curving away from you (now, does "flat Earth" imply perfectly flat or merely a curved plane? Nobody argues that one).
Observe an eclipse, then explain it without the Earth getting in the way. It's a disc? Really? Every eclipse (dozens a year). From every different angle? When the Moon is in all kinds of different positions? You know what object casts a disc shadow no matter which angle you look at it from? A sphere.
And simple travel does not mean "thousands of miles". Your latitude changes everything - from shadows on the ground, to what stars are visible, and that shouldn't be true on flat-earth. Grab a telescope. Now track an object without an equatorial mount (basically an angled gear on a tripod). Arms tired from all the adjustment yet? Okay, put it on an equatorial mount but don't adjust for latitude. Watch as the objects you see drift enormously within a matter of minutes.
Now put it on an equatorial mount that's properly set to your latitude. Watch as everything works and stays in your viewfinder. Now explain that in flat-earth terms.
Technically there should be no difference in latitude at all on a flat-earth - why would it be heated in a band with two tropics E->W but not the same N->S? Does the Earth have a strip of parallel E->W heating elements in it? And is this Earth still circular or is it plane-flat? Because then it gets even odder (if it was circular and centrally heated, you'd expect one point on Earth to be "hottest" and distance from that to result in temperature drops all over, yes?
Far too complex to explain for flat-earth, very simple demo for round-Earth. Explain winter. You don't need to travel to prove that the tropics exist, the equator is mean-hottest and the further North/South you go the colder it gets. You DO need to prove some mechanism for flat-earth to emulate that without being ridiculous.
This is the sort of thing we give to kids to prove in their lunch break, much like the Egyptians, Greeks and every civilisation since has managed to do, casually, without people suddenly expressing denial of it (despite being persecuted for suggesting the Earth is not the center of the universe, etc. simultaneously), without any hi-tech tools, major travel networks, or photography.
I don't lack the words, arguments, reasoning, explanation or capability to prove this to you. What I lack is the impetus, the motivation, and the hourly fee.
P.S. I'm a mathematician. Unfortunately, you try to state there's no math(s) I can use in a matter of seconds to prove the earth is round. There is. But you need to know maths. I can quite happily grace you with a complete geometric analysis of things that ONLY HAPPEN ON SPHERICAL OBJECTS and then link them to things that happen on Earth. But I've avoided the maths because a) I don't get paid enough to write papers for Slashdot flat-earth commentors, b) I would be accused of "using maths, it's all just theory, you know, etc. etc." (I'd give it three comments before someone mentioned completeness, for example).
Go out. Touch that world. Explain why a flat disc, or hyperbolic paraboloid, or plane, or anything other than a near-perfect sphere would result in that phenomenon.
Watch as "compensation effect" takes hold and you have to change not just the shape of the Earth but the orbits of the planets, the motion of the
Wooooosh.
Clearly the cable could be tethered to the moon which I think at least one flat earth theory* places at around 4 miles from the surface of the Earth.
*Not to be confused with the scientific meaning of the word 'theory'
Totally irresponsible: He could have cracked the dome over the earth and all the air would have leaked out.
Bert
On a more serious note: I'm impressed with his launch. So much that can go wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (Top Gear reliant Robin space shuttle)
How many times have YOU wished a politician would strap themselves into a highly dangerous rocket and send him or herself away?
Now here's one that actually does!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley