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Well I guess there is no denying his commitment to his craft :shock:
'Mad' Mike Hughes dies after crash-landing homemade rocket - BBC News
A US daredevil pilot has been killed during an attempted launch of a homemade rocket in the Californian desert.
"Mad" Mike Hughes, 64, crash-landed his steam-powered rocket shortly after take-off near Barstow on Saturday.
A video on social media shows a rocket being fired into the sky before plummeting to the ground nearby.
Hughes was well-known for his belief that the Earth was flat. He hoped to prove his theory by going to space.
This is like news reel level nuttery. What did he think he would see at 5,000 feet that he couldn't see out of the window of a passenger jet flying 7 times higher than that? Did someone ever think of taking him aside and talking him into trying skydiving first? Granted, the parachute deployed on lift off which doomed him.
I remember when I was a kid and this kind of nuttery made it on Wide World of Sports, or as a special TV event starring Evel Kneivel. I guess this was no different. Kneivel was a bad chute deployment away from dead at least once... and so is every sky diver ever, to be completely honest. I guess this one seems worse because somehow the flat-Earth nonsense makes his death more senseless than had he launched just to see if he could... it takes the sense of adventure and replaces it with a sense of stupidity.