Flat Earth weirdo decided to build a homemade rocketship, to fly into orbit and see for himself that the earth was flat.

He launched yesterday, and rose to a height of merely 1,875 feet, before parachuting back down to Earth for a hard landing.

Heck, there are even skyscrapers taller than that. He could have just chartered a Cessna, and gone 10x as high. Or bought a commercial plane ticket, and gone 16x as high.

https://www.foxsports.com/othe...alifornia-sky-032518

While that doesn't sound like a very successful launch I'll bet there are very few here who could do the same. Building a rocket that has enough power to propel a human payload that high requires some rather sophisticated control of the output nozzle, something that was a major hurdle that had to be overcome in the early days of the US Rocket programs post WWII. Take a look at some of the failures that were experienced and it will make you cringe. I recall seeing one film of a loss of control and the rocket got about 50 feet into the air and flipped to horizontal and jetted straight into a line of trees.

Chasing your dream, I guess.

More power to him. Didn't hurt or cost me, so I hope he learns enough to debunk or prove his theory.

Flat-earthers will come up with all kinds of convoluted explanations for, e.g., why there are night and day, lunar eclipses showing a round silhouette of the earth, or seasons. One I had an online "conversation" with claimed the Sun is 30 miles in diameter and 3000 miles away.

quote:

Originally posted by Scooter123:
While that doesn't sound like a very successful launch I'll bet there are very few here who could do the same. Building a rocket that has enough power to propel a human payload that high requires some rather sophisticated control of the output nozzle, something that was a major hurdle that had to be overcome in the early days of the US Rocket programs post WWII. Take a look at some of the failures that were experienced and it will make you cringe. I recall seeing one film of a loss of control and the rocket got about 50 feet into the air and flipped to horizontal and jetted straight into a line of trees.

Blah, blah, blah - it's all moot because rocket boy is doing it to "prove" that the earth is flat. I had to use air quotes around prove because he had zero chance of proving the earth is flat no matter how high his rocket went.

Out of the 80,000 plus members here I bet there aren't any willing to admit they're a flat earther. If they are, I've got a crisp $100 bill that says they aren't crazy enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve 1875 feet to prove the earth is flat.

He's nuttier than the squirrel shit behind the planters factory, but that is badass all the same.

I hope he learned some truth...

Can we put their leader into space already to quash this crap?

How 'bout we just push 'em all off the edge?

Dang, that round earth gravity messed up his experiment.

... well he did it. And proved he did it.

A steam powered rocket? Oh hell no, rocketry is full of gremlins right?

I do however, like how the flat earthers have members all over the world (globe).

Unless it's some sort of religion thing, what is the rational and/or point in believeing the earth is not a globe ? I would direct this question about those believers who are otherwise educated and live in modern society.

Flat earther or not, that is really pretty cool. Good for him for building a machine that has that much lifting power, and good for him for building the machine in a way that he survived the event.

Damn.

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
Unless it's some sort of religion thing, what is the rational and/or point in believeing the earth is not a globe ? I would direct this question about those believers who are otherwise educated and live in modern society.

Good luck. Flat earth believers =/= "rational".

Flat Earthers think there's been a massive conspiracy over the past 2500+ years, consisting of the media, educational institutions, world governments, scientific institutions, airline companies, space organizations, etc., to fool everyone into believing the world is a sphere, when it's actually a flat disc.

They ignore copious amounts of actual data and scientific evidence that don't suit their ridiculous theory, then latch on to pieces of dubious pseudo-scientific "evidence" that they claim prove their theory to be correct.

They're in the same category as the conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked, or that the government uses flouride in the water system and chemicals in airplane contrails for mind-control purposes. Real tin-foil hat territory.

We just spent two days at Kennedy Space Center. The one thing that caught my attention was all of the failures. Some quite spectacular. Some while in space. And some tragic.

Looking up at the small rockets in the Rocket Garden and seeing the tiny capsule some one sat in to get to space made me really wonder what kind of person thinks "Hey, nobody has ever done this before, but sure, I'll go." Then you look at the Saturn V: 7.5 million pounds of thrust, 94% of its mass is fuel, three people died during the dress rehearsal for the first launch, but ya, I'll go.

God bless Mike Hughes.

What's really dumb is that for a few hundred $, one can purchase a solid telescope and observe our moon and other planets 1st hand seeing they are all spheres.

So; why would the Earth be flat when all other observable planets aren't? I've gotten some really good Jupiter and Saturn views in my backyard.

Link to video, I'm wholly unimpressed.
Link

quote:

But there wasn’t any footage of him climbing into the craft, leading some to question whether he even took off.

Heh.

Conspiracy theorists came up with a conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theorist who was attempting to verify the conspiracy theory!

Well it's pretty impressive that a limo driver by profession turned self taught rocket man could reach that height and 350 MPH and live to tell about it... with steam power to boot.

the actual manned launch.


https://globalnews.ca/video/41...-prove-earth-is-flat

How does one continuously fly east (or west) and eventually end up in the same place if the earth is flat? How do they explain that?