"Mad" Mike Hughes is a limo driver turned daredevil who wants to build his own rocket and launch himself into space to prove to the entire globe that the world is flat after all. There’s one problem with his plan: Big Government regulations are conspiring to keep him grounded for good.
A space rocket is a pretty tough thing to build, so Hughes is starting with a simpler goal: a smaller rocket that’ll send him a mile across the ground and more than a thousand feet into the air. This probably won’t be high enough to prove the Earth is flat, but hey, we all have to start somewhere.
Because of the Bureau of Land Management, however, Hughes might not be able to launch at all. The plan was to launch the rocket in the town of Amboy, Calif., but the BLM forbade him from launching on public lands. Hughes said he’s found private property in the area to launch from and could reschedule the launch to as early as next week.
For Hughes, flat Earth theory was something he came to believe after “research[ing] it for several months in between doing everything else.” That’s a very small amount of time spent to reject something scientists have known for millennia, so it’s probably not surprising to learn that Hughes has a low opinion of science.
"I don't believe in science," Hughes said to the AP in an interview. "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.” The multiple generations of rocket scientists that developed those formulas would probably disagree.
But whether the Earth is flat or round, we won’t be able to find out until Hughes straps himself to his rocket and blasts off from the spherical planet we all live on. Only then will we finally learn the truth.
Source: NPR
