Hey got a steam powered rocket I can borrow!
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The life and death of daredevil ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes
The daredevil known as “Mad Mike” Hughes died in a rocket crash in 2020. He was an amateur rocket builder on a quest to prove that the Earth is flat.
- By
- Avishay Artsy
- May 20, 2022
Listen 12:06
A 2017 photo shows daredevil “Mad Mike” Hughes with his steam-powered rocket constructed out of salvage parts. (Waldo Stakes / AP)
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.
Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It takes a certain kind of person to build a rocket and launch themself inside it. “Mad Mike” Hughes was a limousine driver turned stuntman. What made him famous was not just his homemade rockets, but why he wanted to build them: to shoot himself to the edge of space, to prove that the Earth is flat.
Hughes’ third and final rocket launch, on February 22, 2020, ended in his death at the age of 64.
Freelance journalist Justin Chapman is writing a book about Hughes, and was at the final launch in the desert outside Barstow, Calif.
“There were about 50 spectators there,” Chapman said. “There were a couple of live streamers, like YouTubers, some Flat Earth folks, and there was a TV crew that was filming the launch for a Science Channel show called ‘Homemade Astronauts.’”
Mad Mike Hughes just launched himself in a self-made steam-powered rocket and crash landed. Very likely did not survive.
#MadMike #MadMikeHughes pic.twitter.com/svtviTEi8f
— Justin Chapman (@justindchapman)
February 22, 2020
When the rocket took off, it hit a ladder propped up next to it, tearing off one of the parachutes. The rocket soared in an arc, it disappeared into the sky for a moment, and then started to fall.
“And as it’s coming down, everyone started realizing that his parachutes weren’t coming out. Even if they had, at this point, it was going to be too late. And he nose dived directly into the desert floor,” Chapman said.
“It was like a lawn dart, and hit the ground at somewhere between four and 500 miles an hour,” said Waldo Stakes, Hughes’ close friend and collaborator. Stakes taught Hughes how to build rockets.
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