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Last week, we covered the ambitions of "Mad Mike" Hughes, a limo driver with dreams of proving anybody wrong nearly the shape of the World. Alternately, Mike Hughes may be an opportunist, one who converted to Flat Eartherism after discovering the Flat Earth community (with members all around the globe, natch) was willing to contribute a not bad deal of funding to his rocket inquiry. But opportunist or beatnik, Mike Hughes is nonetheless adamant to launch his rocket. Information technology turns out that the BLM (Agency of Land Management) merely wasn't as excited near his plans as he was.

The BLM put a end to Hughes' rocket launch last Sabbatum, cheerlessly informing the would-exist rocket "scientist" that he lacked an appropriate permit to launch himself roughly 1,800 feet into the air at a distance of one mile. Before reports, including ours, stated that he wanted to go a mile loftier; it at present appears he's targeting 1,800-ii,000 feet and wants to travel a mile over the Earth. (Also, what kind of permit does 1 need for individual rocket launches?)

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"You'll need to fill up out a 1056A; 'Potentially Suicidal Impulse Expressed via Rocket Launching'."

Mike's stated long-term desire is to build a rocket capable of traveling high plenty to observe (or disprove) the curve of the Earth, thereby validating the scientific delusions of a group of people who believe in a vast, millennia-long conspiracy stretching from the reports of Phoenician sailors who circumnavigated Africa as office of an expedition commissioned by Pharaoh Necho II (610-595 BC) to NASA astronauts. The fact that NASA astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were Freemasons was sufficient to pin them as being involved in "the roots of the deception." No plausible caption is offered for how dozens of other astronauts across the past l years who were non Freemasons came to the same conclusions.

It's non at all articulate, nonetheless, Hughes could always reach his target altitude with the type of steam-powered rockets he's building. Steam-powered rockets have a low specific impulse and take never been used for anything approximating an orbital or sub-orbital flight. There are also numerous practical considerations when building a rocket or hybrid rocket plane that can operate efficiently that high in the air. Hughes' 2022 tests, which used parachutes that hadn't operated in 20 years (one of them failed to deploy), but wouldn't cut it for an aircraft in suborbital flight.

In that location'due south a reason why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos decided to fund major rocket companies,as opposed to building homemade rockets in their backyards (Musk, according to Hughes, is a "giant fraud"). It's not because they couldn't afford to literally do then, but because to perform the kind of reliability tests and detailed assay required for ongoing spaceflight, y'all demand buildings and equipment that can't exist justified on a solo flight budget.

And don't forget, all of this is orchestrated by a homo who claims not to believe in science. "I don't believe in science," Hughes told the AP. "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 non science, that's but a formula. There'south no difference betwixt science and science fiction."

Godspeed, Mike Hughes. If something goes wrong out there, divine intervention is really your best option.