Limousine driver and self-proclaimed rocket scientist (who doesn’t believe in science) “Mad” Mike Hughes was all set to pilot his self-designed and self-built $20,000 rocket over the California ghost town of Amboy on Saturday. Sponsored by Research Flat Earth, an organization that he aligned with after several months of his own research, Hughes was going to soar to a height of 1,800 feet at speeds as high as 500 mph in order to prove that history’s greatest minds have been wrong and the Earth is, in fact, flat.
Unfortunately, the government and faulty mechanics got in his way and the 61-year-old daredevil had to postpone his very-well-hyped flight.
Once the Associated Press first reported on his ambitious spectacle, with many other outlets quick to follow, Hughes was contacted by the Bureau of Land Management and told that his launch was a no-go.
“They informed me that they were not going to allow me to do the event there, at least at that location,” Hughes said in the above video. “Previously, when I asked for the permission… they had left it up the FAA, and they said they had jurisdiction. Of course, the FAA didn’t approve it — they can’t honestly approve it — they just said, ‘Well, we know that you’re going to do it there.’ Basically, once this story broke Monday morning with the Associated Press, this thing blew up, went around the world…
“Basically, my feeling is one of the top executives at the Bureau of Land Management in Washington DC called California and said, ‘Hey, who’s this guy, what’s going on, and who permitted this?’ They probably said, ‘There’s no paperwork here. We know the guy.’ So, it turned out to be not a good thing.”
According to the Washington Post, despite Hughes’ claim that he had a “verbal agreement” from the agency for more than a year, officials from the BLM had “no record of speaking with Hughes and that he had not applied for the necessary special recreation permit to hold an event on public land.”
Permitting was hardly the worst of Hughes’ troubles, however. As he was leaving for Amboy, his motorhome/rocket launcher broke down in the driveway. The good news is that it only took Hughes two hours to fix his RV, and Albert Okura, the owner of Amboy, offered another launch site three miles away from the ghost town. Hughes said it’s wide enough and long enough, and the launch could happen this week.
The launch will be the next step in his quest to achieve space flight, as he plans to one day lift a rocket by balloon to blast off into low Earth orbit.
