Posted on 01/27/2018 4:52:44 PM PST by Simon Green
When last we heard of “Mad Mike” Hughes, the 61-year-old limo driver and stuntman who planned on launching a $20,000 steam-fueled rocket with “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” painted on the side some 1,800 feet into the air at 500 miles per hour, the gosh darn government had intervened to tell him he couldn’t conduct any such launch on public lands.
But Hughes has not been deterred, and in a number of posts on his Facebook page he claims to have a real launch planned for February 3rd. This one will be a vertical rather than horizontal launch, which Hughes believes will prevent him from crossing over into public property and thus getting in trouble with the government.
“That way we got enough buffer that when it lands, it will not be on [Bureau of Land Management] property,” Hughes said in a video last week.
Hughes has launched homemade rockets with himself as the human cargo before, but he’s only recently become a Flat Earth convert at the same time he needed to raise further funds for DIY rocketry, according to the Washington Post.
It’s still not entirely clear what Hughes intends to prove with the launch because, as LiveScience noted, observing the curvature of the Earth requires one rise some 35,000 feet (10,700 meters) above the ground. Hughes’ rocket will not be capable of attaining anywhere near that height, which is good because videos of his parachutes are far from reassuring.
However, our guy is not a huge fan of the scientific disciplines anyhow, as he told the Associated Press in a prior interview:
I don’t believe in science. I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.
We’ve all been let down on this Flat-Earth-rocket stuff before, but Hughes seems pretty insistent that this time there will actually be a launch.
Pang...
I feel confidant in saying that this guy will not live to be a 62-year-old limo driver and stuntman.
Flat earth? Those guys rate right up there with the sovereign citizens for too dumb to breathe.
CC
Next Darwin Award winner.
They’re gonna scrape this guy up with a spatula.......
...some of him
There is something inconsistent about those numbers. If he can get to a speed of 500 mph, he should be able to gain at least 8500 feet of altitude (unless he wants to put out the parachutes on the way up).
But of course this idiot doesn’t believe in science anyway. Where does he think those “formulas” come from?
“For a couple hundred bucks you can get a weather balloon, a camera and some radio equipment to take a picture of the curvature of the earth. Unless he wants to keep an eye on it to make sure no round earthers intercept the camera and put a distorting lens on it.”
For less than that, you can make a Foucault pendulum which shows it as well. Flat Earth guys don’t believe the Earth rotates either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum
Don’t be a silly billy. Even if Newton hadn’t invented gravity, if the world was round all the water would slide off into space!
Only if he doesn’t launch to close to the edge. :)
If the earth were really flat, cats would have knocked everything off of it long ago.
The potential for spectacular fail is high.
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