Mad Mike Hughes, the guy who build a steam-powered rocket to prove that the Earth is flat, succeeded in launching himself into the sky yesterday. He reached an altitude of about 600 meters, was battered in the landing, but he survived.
The one thing he did not accomplish was to prove that the Earth is flat.
I don’t quite get the point of the rocket, though. He could have just rented a Cessna, which has a service ceiling of something around 5000 meters, and reached a significantly higher altitude with little personal risk, and he probably wouldn’t have needed to be carried away in a stretcher afterwards.
Mars! Here we come!
The final punchline from the article:
Nothing says skills in governance like homebrew rockets and kook theories.
Also, I’m fairly sure you can get at least 1,875 feet up just by climbing mountains.
Did you not know that aircraft windows are specially shaped to show the earth as curved? Apparently this is why the earth seems curved at high altitudes.
Still havent worked out how they explain night and day occurring at different times on a flat surface though.
Well, and he’s going to run for governor, too!
In the article, it almost sounds like he regards people who think the Earth is an oblate spheroid as “kooks”. That’s pretty interesting. I guess I’m cynical but I would not be surprised to see him in government, next. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?
Renting a Cessna would just make him part of the Great Airplane Conspiracy. Their windows are probably displays with faked round-Earth imagery projected onto them. Only by building his craft from scratch can he Know the Truth!
Also, he’s an idiot.
He could go up in Luscomb, a plane where the windows open, or one of the open-cockpit ultra-light airplanes, go higher (up to 10,000 feet legally, higher if he wants to take oxygen), and not have to deal with window distortion or stickers or whatever. Moron!
As pointed out before, this guy already launched multiple rockets before he glommed onto the Flatearther movement, conveniently after he couldn’t get his latest rocket financed. After his “conversion”, he quickly got the money together.
He is a thrill-seeker, who has found a convenient gullible population to finance his dangerous hobby.
@madtom1999, 3:
Most seem to believe in some spotlight-like sun. Yeah, they are idiots, haven’t you noticed?
“Still havent worked out how they explain night and day occurring at different times on a flat surface though.”
Terry Pratchett explains this on the Discworld by claiming that Discworld light is slow and slightly heavy. Civilizations in the desert of the Great Nef take advantage of this fact to store it in large dams.
Gee. With a little more tinkering and a few more bux from his true believers, he might manage to embarrass the Montgolfier brothers!
http://www.museumofflight.org/exhibits/montgolfier-brothers-balloon
Way to show the way, Mike! If only we had a few more like you, we could reach the future before it even gets here?
I can’t wait until he tries to prove that it’s possible to fly down!
There is a wayward question mark in that last comment.
Please replace it with a period or exclamation point
as you please.
Keyboards. How do they work?
He could try for a Red Bull sponsorship and repeat Baumgardner’s jump.
Rent a plane? Why? There a *buildings* higher than he went up, he can just take an elevator.
If Earth is flat, then how do the moon and sun work?
It seems to me the only “flat” he got out of this was flat on his back.
The entire sky is just a huge planetarium! The details are sketched in Genesis, I believe. (Actually, now that I’ve finally unearthed my ancient Dover paperback of the original Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, the answers are
atabout five yards away from my fingertips, but it’s lunchtime so I’ll have to wait to find them.)Pet peeve: Stop calling it a steam-powered rocket. That makes it sound like coal-burning fantasy tech, like Doc Brown’s time-travelling train from the end of “Back to the Future 3”.
Yes, what shoots out of that rocket IS steam, but its actual FUEL is hydrogen peroxide, which is broken down by a catalyst to make the steam.
You aren’t going to win that one, danielrutter. Old coal-fired train engines are referred to as steam trains. Most people will refer to this vehicle as a steam-powered rocket because it sounds colloquial to go along with the old-timey nutter who’s riding in it supposedly trying to convince the world the earth is flat.
An issue with referring to the rocket as “steam-powered” is that, if it were, that would be impressive. Impractical, but impressive.
Having said that, there have been a few actual steam(-powered) rockets, excluding the hydrogen peroxide misnomer.
danielrutter – the fuel for steam trains is coal.
mod prime@18: “the fuel for steam trains is coal.”
This gets into slippery linguistic territory. Without water in the boiler all the coal in the world won’t propel the steam train anywhere. The two work together and it’s irrational to my mind to separate them. But if coal can be said to be the fuel then the steam is the propellant.
What was the fuel for the Saturn 5 first stage, the oxygen or the hydrogen? Together the two are combined to make a propellant.
So? The train also wouldn’t propel itself without the boiler, wheels, tracks or various other bits. That does not make any of those other parts fuel. The coal (or wood, etc.) plays that role, and there are other roles for those things to play.
The first stage used RP-1 as the fuel, while the others used liquid hydrogen. Liquid oxygen was the oxidizer.
When you burn a log, the log is the fuel. That reacts with oxygen in the air, which is not fuel.
To go back to the train example, the air around the coal is necessary for combustion, and it is not fuel. It is of course separate from the steam contained within the boiler, and there is no reason to treat them as equivalent. Steamy coal is not the recipe that we’re looking for here. And the “slipperiness” you speak of is just you confusing all of these things, not a problem with our language.
Retired airplane inspector here. With many hundreds of hours as a pilot and ancillary stuff like that. About half our lifetime training was “how to fool passengers and everybody else about the fact that the earth is actually flat as a pancake.” Otherwise you could go to Wal-Mart and get your handy-dandy fancy-schmancy airplane inspection or even pilot license.
Glad to have cleared that up. I AM part of the conspiracy.
QED.
@15 Any more info on the thing he used as a catalyst ,seems like he built his very own Walter HWK509 rocket engine .
If that is the case he is lucky not to have blown himself up .
A fool and his planet are soon parted.
Citation seems needed here. According to the Nov-2017 AP report, Self-taught rocket scientist plans to launch over ghost town (cringes over the title):
That suggests, according to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge, it is a crude form of a genuine steam-powered rocket:
There’s no evidence yet that he was in the top of the rocket.
This reminds me of Evil Knieval. All fake.
I should have added, As he rocketed across the river gorge, but didn’t.
Mythbusters sent a hot water service into flight just by heating the water electrically, using generators.
“Also, he’s an idiot.”
I disagree. He would have to engage in years of intense study to rise to that level.
Ed Seedhouse @19: Language is indeed a funny old thing. We think of fuel as the substance which provides energy, and oxygen as an agent in its release. But if this paper is right, it’s oxygen which is the energy provider in combustion. Maybe it’s nonsense, I’m not qualified to say. Perhaps the local chemists can comment.
Anyway, the words are probably locked in. Coal or kerosene or hamburgers or whatever will continue to be called fuel. We tend to cling to names, even if they turn out to be misleading.
Easy. The steam is not the propellant in the recent usage of the term. Both RP1 and LOX are propellants, as would be coal and LOX. They provide the thrust through their combustion products. Steam is of by-product of the the combustion of coal and oxygen, heating water as an unnecessary middle compound. makes it inefficient. The third party is not (water for stream) a direct entity in the energy of combustion to fly the vehicle. Water from a hydolox (hydrogen gas/LOX) engine would be considered closer, but LH2 and LOX are the propellants.
@Nerd of Redhead:
I always try to be careful to use “propellant” for either fuel or oxidizer and “propellants” for both, but the general public seems hopelessly confused, especially since the energy source and reaction mass are the same thing. In a nuclear rocket, say, where the energy source and the (inert) reaction mass are divorced from each other–well, that seems to cause general brainlock.
Flat Earth is so last month, anyway, the latest thing is the Great Jet Fuel Conspiracy™. Since the Troofers’ “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” was finally laughed to scorn, the latest thing is that jets don’t use liquid fuel, anyway–they run on compressed air, so crashing one into a building wouldn’t cause a fire at all. Wake up, sheeple!
Good grief. I didn’t believe there was such a conspiracy, but after a bit of fumbling finally found the correct Generalissimo Google sauce to locate several breathless videos (at least) on that general theme. At which point I stopped, as it was clear I’d just stepped into a giant rabbit hole; e.g., and that’s one of the tamer ones…
Don’t get the point? Really!?! The point is it’s fuckin cool! Build a rocket and shoot yourself into the sky. What’s not to love. We should celebrate this All American Crank, an all too rare creature these days.
The local birdlife just watched from 3000 feet and laughed.
The flat earthers gave him the money … when there was a mountain right behind the launch site? It looks considerable higher than 600 meters. They could have saved their money, not used it to rent a Cessna either, but just climbed that mountain and looked from there.
Okay.
But in what possible way does this exceedingly dangerous event fit in with that goal?
I doubt that Hughes used hydrogen peroxide. The fact that Hughes is still alive is the give-away. If your tank or the contents were contaminated with anything that catalyzed the decomposition of the H2O2, you would have a thermal run-away that would end with your tank exploding. If you get 80%+ H2O2 on your skin, you would combust – in flames. 30% H2O2 on your skin will hurt like the devil and will turn your skin white. See https://youtu.be/aCPYw_FJNN8?t=34m9s for a video of T-Stoff being added to cloth. H2O2 was the oxidizer “T-Stoff” used during WWII in the German Komet. 80-85% H2O2. One can buy 30% H2O2 from a chemical supply company, but 80%+ would probably need to be obtained from a specialty chemical supply house. Or, you could try distilling 30% to 80%. A friend of mine who worked on the Roton rocket blew up his bathroom distilling it.
Ed Seedhouse, @ #19:
The steam in a steam engine is the working fluid.
@38 As a weapon the Komet was very successful in killing lot of Luftwaffe pilots .
So after all that, did he see the curvature? Did it change his views, or enhance them?
Really,THIS was the point of his rocket, not for kicks but to “prove the world is flat”. So…did it? Did he even look at the earth, again the point of the journey, or was he too busy crapping his pants?
Always a mark of a good scientist who performs an experiment and then ignores the results in favour of telling people how cool the experiment was for them to perform.
mamba@41, No, the “flat-Earth proof” is the point of the so-called “Rockoon” mentioned by others. From the article linked to in the OP:
What the point of the just-flown “rocket” is isn’t clear. Other than bilking money out of credulous woo-woos, that is. Maybe he plans to use a really long power cord from a generator on the ground to the balloon to power heaters to heat up the water in the “rocket” it carries…?