![]() ![]() It got dragged a few hundred feet and then shredded as the rocket climbed straight up to a few thousand feet, hit apogee, and came down with no chute. The video of the launch yesterday shows one of his chutes deployed within a few seconds of launch. In 2018 he pulled his second chute late, It fully deployed, but he still came in fast and ended up in the hospital. The documentary of Mike’s 2018 launch showed he had an automatic chute deploy at apogee, followed by a manual second chute deploy. In a similar twist of fate, his parachute deployed prematurely in mid flight also, but Knievel survived the crash landing in the canyon. Knievel also used a (not well tested) steam rocket “skycycle x2” to attempt a jump of the snake river canyon in 1974. ![]() My take is that he was more Evel Knievel than rocket enthusiast. Very crazy stuff! Given the success of that launch it really isn’t clear what he had to gain by doing the same launch over again, except for the new TV publicity. There is a good documentary on Amazon (free with prime) that chronicles his life and the 2018 launch. The daredevil didn't have the advantage of extensive safety measures and tests, then, and had defied the odds by emerging from past landings with relatively minor injuries.I’ve also been following Mad Mike since his launch in 2018. He partly relied on crowdfunding from fellow Flat Earth devotees over the years. Hughes had a tight budget, though, having spent about $18,000 on the rocket. It's not clear at this stage why the rocket failed. His first rocket launch in 2014 took him to 1,374 feet, but successive launches didn't travel much higher. Hughes' goal had been to verify his belief in a disc-shaped Earth by flying to space, with successive launches taking him higher and higher in altitude. The launch was being filmed for a Science Channel series, Homemade Astronauts, that aims to document the adventures of amateur rocket makers. The Flat Earth advocate died on February 22nd at the age of 64 when the chute for his steam-powered rocket detached shortly after launch, leading to a high-velocity crash in the desert near Barstow, California. The saga of "Mad" Mike Hughes and his homebuilt rocket has come to a tragic end. ![]()
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