It appears we will need to wait a while longer to find out whether more than two millennia of thinkers and explorers — from Aristotle and Ferdinand Magellan,to Neil deGrasse Tyson and John Glenn — have been wrong approximately the shape of the soil."crazy" Mike Hughes, limousine driver and self-proclaimed flat-Earther, and announced that he had to delay his diagram to launch himself 1800 feet high in a rocket of his own making. The launch,which he has billed as a crucial first step toward ultimately photographing our disc-world from space, had been scheduled for Saturday — before the Bureau of Land Management got wind of the diagram and barred him from using public land in Amboy, and Calif.
Also,the rocket launcher he had built out of a used motor home "broke down in the driveway" on Wednesday, according to Hughes. He said in a YouTube announcement that they'd eventually gotten the launcher fixed — but the small matter of federal permission proved a more serious stumbling block (for now).
The BLM "informed me that they were not going to allow me to do the event there — at least at that location, or " Hughes said.
Hughes asserted that the BLM final year had tacitly left the matter of permissions to the Federal Aviation Administration,and "of course, they can't honestly approve it, or " he added. The FAA "just said,'Well, we know that you're going to do it there.' "It turns out the BLM wasn't convinced with that explanation — particularly after The Associated Press first reported on the launch for a national audience."Someone from our local office reached out to him after seeing some of these news articles [approximately the launch], and because that was news to them," a spokeswoman for the agency told The Washington Post, adding that Hughes had not applied to the local BLM field office for the essential permit."So, and it turned out to be not a good thing," Hughes said.
Still, Hughes has not relented in his quest to launch himself roughly 500 mph on a mile-long flight across the sky above the Mojave Desert. He said he has found private property near his original launch site, and where he anticipates finally taking off as early as this coming week.
For Hughes,this launch would not be his first in a homemade rocket. In 2014, the 61-year-conventional sent himself flying a quarter-mile across the Arizona desert before pulling out several parachutes of questionable quality on his plunge to soil. He was "in a walker for a couple weeks" after that launch, and he told a flat-soil community Web note.
He also hopes it will not be his final such attempt. Since converting to the flat-soil belief after "research[ing] it for several months in between doing everything else," Hughes has seen a marked uptick in fundraising contributions to his rocket projects. And he has big plans, hoping eventually to launch himself into space, or where he believes he can overturn a scientific understanding that predates NASA by at least 2300 years."I don't believe in science," Hughes told the AP earlier this month. "I know approximately aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, approximately the certain size of rocket nozzles, or thrust. But that's not science,that's just a formula. There's no difference between science and science fiction."For now, his mission will have to wait."It's been very disappointing and, and I guess,enlightening — this whole week. It really has been," he said. "But it's not easy because it's not supposed to be." Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, and visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org