Joel Kontinen
After two failed attempts, self-made rocket builder Mike Hughes finally managed to take to the skies in his space vehicle.
He reached an altitude of 572 metres (1,875 feet) above the Mojave Desert in California before parachuting to the earth.
Mr. Hughes believes the earth is flat, and his motive in blasting to the skies was to prove that he was right.
That was something he was unable to do this time, so he hopes to build a more powerful rocked that would carry him to an altitude of 110 kilometres (68 miles).
He hopes to prove his thesis by taking high-altitude photographs.
However, NASA beat him by 50 years. The pictures the Apollo 8 astronauts took while orbiting the Moon show that the Earth is round.
The earthrise photos tell the same story.
The modern flat earth myth probably hails from Washington Irving’s (1783–1859) fictional biography of Christopher Columbus. Obviously, some seamen were afraid of falling over the earth’s edge.
However, there never was a time in Medieval Europe when most people believed our planet was flat.
Coins and symbols made in the Holy Roman Empire depicted a round earth, and so did Medieval scholars.
Source:
Bryner, Jeanna. 2018. Flat-Earther Blasts Himself into the Sky on Homemade Rocket (and He Survives). Live Science (25 March).
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