Adorable flat-earth rocket "scientist" sort of launches his first big "spaceship"

Big news this weekend for sociopathically stubborn narcissists, people who misunderstand and thus fear science and Kyrie Irving, whether he was running an experiment or not: A man who’s been trying for years to prove that the earth is flat finally managed to launch a rocket! We will get to why those two sentence clauses go together in a moment, but first let’s pause to pat this guy on the back and get him a Flavor-Ice. We’re proud of you here on the plate-like enormous floating disc on which humans live, work and orbit, somehow.

Meet “Mad” Mike Hughes (nickname self-applied, although take a nice hot look at his picture, he’s just getting out in front of this), a self-declared Flat Earth Researcher, self-taught rocket scientist and, we’ll just go ahead and guess, home-schooled barber. He is also a 61-year-old limo driver, a job for which we assume he was trained.

On Sunday, Hughes managed to get a self-designed steam-powered rocket all the way up to 1,875 feet into the air. Which is great, and the video looks pretty scary! Now, fancy haterz with “science doctorates” and “childhood friends” and “42 fewer bumper stickers slapped diagonally on the rusted bumper of their 1986 Dodge Rams” will whine, “that’s like 61 3/4 miles fewer than required to see earth from space,” but that’s missing the POINT, which is apparently that Hughes didn’t incinerate himself during the attempt, because that’s the actual baseline we’re dealing with here. (This would be like Tesla saying, yes, we know the Falcon Heavy didn’t actually get to space, but let’s focus on how it didn’t disintegrate when it passed those birds.)

Why the low bar? Because Hughes has tried and failed before. Twice he’s attempted to launch a steam-powered rocket decorated with the words “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH”—in a near-miracle, all the words were spelled correctly—and twice he failed, once because of Deep State operatives in the Bureau of Land Management and once because of technical problems, we guess? If you can make sense of this, you send a message to one of the satellites floating over Humanity’s Shared Disc and let us know.

All of which is why Sunday’s launch was such a BIG DEAL, and one that gets him 1/40,000th of a way to proving that astrophysics is a government-funded fraud. Hughes and his toy rocket managed to blast off from Amboy, California, in the Mojave Desert (described in the lamestream sheep-media as a “ghost town”), and make it nearly all the way to half of a mile into the cosmos (I am pretty sure there are kites that go higher.)

After the alleged flight, which ended with a landing in the desert that you would not enjoy, Hughes said he was “relieved.” “I’m tired of people saying I chickened out and didn’t build a rocket,” he told the AP. “I‘m tired of that stuff. I manned up and did it.” YOU HEAR THAT, NERDS? He dug in on a cause that is demonstrably false, attempted a project for which he was deeply unqualified, failed hard twice, achieved the most basic possible version of his nebulous goal, came nowhere near proving the case he was trying to make and nearly blew himself up, but he DID IT. This is America in 2018: I failed to do the idiot thing I was trying to do, but YEAH! Suck it, libtards.

Because this wasn’t about “achieving the goal he’s made a public spectacle of himself to reach.” This was about STEP ONE, people, going confidently in the direction of your dreams, and if this man’s dream is to Flowbee his hair and stare down the whole of the scientific community, we should let him, because the scientists have books and books are f**king terrifying.

“Am I glad I did it?” Hughes told the AP, and get ready for a quote that will leave you with the uncomfortable ending of feeling bad for this guy. “Yeah, I guess. I’ll feel it in the morning. At least I can go home and have dinner and see my cats tonight.” Oh, honey no.

We will leave the last word to the great Neil deGrasse Tyson, who essentially wakes up and tomahawk-dunks on these clowns for a morning workout yet somehow never gets less funny about it. "Let me be blunt," Tyson said in an interview with TMZ after Kyrie did whatever that was. "We live in a free country, so you ought to be able to think and say whatever you want. If he wants to think earth is flat, go right ahead—as long as he continues to play basketball and not become head of any space agencies. My point is if you have certain limitations of understanding of the natural world, stay away from jobs that require that."

Also, this:

In short, if you have certain limitations of the understanding of rocketry, raise cats.