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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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