Canceled last year, the rocket flight over the Mojave Desert is due to take place in early February. His goal is to raise funds for the construction of an aircraft on which Mike Hugh will rise into the stratosphere and check what shape the Earth is.
Flat-earth enthusiast, engineer by vocation and limousine driver Mike Hugh decided to take a look at the Earth with his own eyes and find out what shape it is. He doubts that the Earth is in the shape of a ball, he does not trust the footage taken from orbit, and NASA calls it a Masonic organization in some interviews.
Hugh made an estimate last year; according to this document, a balloon, a jetpack and a spacesuit will cost no less than $ 2 million. The flat-earth enthusiast did not have that kind of money, so he was going to arrange an action: to fly 1.5 kilometers over the Mojave Desert on a rocket with a steam engine.
The flight was scheduled for last December and never took place. Hugh blamed the State Agency for Land Management; a few hours before the start, officials banned him from starting. And while the engineer was trying to sort out the documents on the ground, his rocket broke.
Hugh is now ready for a new launch; the modified rocket should take off on February 3 and climb to an altitude of about 600 meters. By doing so, the engineer hopes to regain public confidence, undermined by the cancellation of a previous launch and accusations that Hugh is using the idea of a flat earth only to fund his projects. He solved the problem with the ground: he would take off on a private territory, and the state would not be able to stop him, he told The Washington Post.
In recent months, Hugh has had more doubts about what is being taught in school. Now he does not believe in the modern theory of the structure of the Earth: “We have only drilled to a depth of about 12 kilometers, so all the talk about the mantle is nonsense. Nobody knows what's really there,”he says.
The flight demonstration scheduled for February is only the first phase of a large project. If it ends in luck, Hugh is counting on large donations, due to which he is going to carry out the second phase - in fact, a flight into space. Having risen to 83 thousand kilometers (technically, this is not quite space, but the Earth can be surveyed from this height), Hugh is going to photograph what he sees, and once and for all decide for himself questions about the shape of the Earth and global conspiracies.