One of the best things in the world to me is that there are still people who think that said world is flat. Anyone who ties a GoPro to a weather balloon can see the actual curvature of the earth, and we have photographs taken by astronauts of a round Earth. “Fake news!” say the Flat-Earthers, like rapper B.o.B. or NBA player Kyrie Irving.
Well, one of these geniuses is going to launch himself into space in a homemade rocket to prove that the Earth is flat. At least eventually. For now, daredevil Mike Hughes is going to fly his homemade rocket at an altitude of 1,800 feet, which probably isn’t even high enough to actually see the curvature of the earth.
Okay, so Mike Hughes might actually be a genius. Stuntmen aren’t really the draw they used to be, and when Hughes first tried to raise money for his upcoming flight, in which he’ll jump an entire (abandoned) town, he only got $300.
A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community Web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.
“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I’m a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”
Painting “Flat Earth” on the side of his rocket and saying Neil Armstrong is a Freemason on a podcast got Hughes a cool $8,000 to help build his rocket. So his sudden conversion from Guinness-verified world record holder to flat-Earth crazy person kind of makes sense. People who believe in crazy things will spend their money very unwisely to prove all the people who (correctly) call them crazy wrong.
But he won’t be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And even if it’s a success, he’s promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disc. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into outer space.
That sounds bad-ass, honestly. Of course, if he actually makes it out of the Earth’s atmosphere, he’d die of exposure almost instantly. Which would honestly be the most metal death ever. And the last thing he’d see would be a big blue ball looking back at him.