Rocket Man, burning out his fuse up here alone

Flight is apparently in the air around Pink Slip. Just last week, it was the winged victory of Fred Reffet, who, wearing a "jet-powered wingsuit" took flight in Dubai. This week's contribution to Space Force comes courtesy of the recently-late "Mad" Mike Hughes, a daredevil who crashed last week in his homemade rocket, trying to prove that the earth is flat.

The plan: Float dozens of miles high in a balloon, then fly a rocket to the Karman line, the 62-mile-high barrier that separates the atmosphere and the cold vacuum of space, filming the entire way. “For three hours, the world stops,” Hughes said during a live stream, imagining the reaction. (Source: Washington Post)

The reality:

...his crudely built contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, Calif. He was 64.

...“Everyone was just stunned and didn’t know what to do,” [reporter Justin Chapman] told The Washington Post on Sunday. “They were silent for a long time.” 

Hughes’s support team went to inspect the crash site about a half mile away, Chapman said, and returned with the harrowing news: Hughes was dead, the rocket had pancaked, and the other three parachutes never deployed.  

On the daredevil continuum, I'm way on the end of the spectrum. 

The only horses I've ever been on are rocking horses and merry-go-round steeds. 

I've made a couple of trips to one of theose racetracks where you drive around in little cars. I got lapped repeatedly. 

One time, my husband and I were got on one of those summer toboggan runs at a ski resort in Vermont. He took off, and I followed behind, keeping one foot firmly on the slow-down pedal. That is, until sleds started backing up behind me, yelling at me to speed things up. So I had to ease up on the brake. 

I'm sure if I ever got on a Segway I'd end up with a broken hip and/or a broken skull. So I don't get on a Segway.

On a rented moped in Bermuda, I started to head the wrong way (i.e., the right way, the way we do it in America) into a 

rotary. On my way to correcting, I crashed into a stone wall.

I wasn't a particularly chicken-shit kid. I climbed trees. Crossed a steep (at least to a 10 year old) ravine on a downed tree trunk. Got in an out-sized baby buggy with a bunch of other kids and had someone send us down a hill. When there was an appliance carton to be had, I was one of the kids taking my turn to have it rolled down the steep front-yard banks and go crashing over the cement retaining wall onto the sidewalk. One of my favorite things as a kid was crawling under parked trucks, hoping the truck driver wasn't anywhere near. On sled or flying saucer, I liked going fast and loved it when my father iced the track that shot through the woods next to our house. I liked exploring creepy old garages, barns, houses. On our poorly footed backyard swing sets, I liked orchestrating things so that three kids were pumping all at once so we could get the legs of the swing set airborne.

But the older I've gotten, the less interested I've become in anything that's physically daunting. I'll never sky dive. I'll never dive off a diving board. I'd consider ziplining. Maybe. 

I'm just not an adventurer of the body. I'm more an adventurer of the mind. I like to read. I like to think. I like to do Extra Hard Sudoku. 

So, nothing like Mike Hughes, who, prior to becoming a rocket man, had done a 103-foot jump in a stretch limo. In preparing to jump the Snake River (a leap that Evil Knievel had failed at), he crashed a rocket. He piloted an earlier version of one of this garage-made rockets nearly two-thousand feet above the Mojave Desert, achieving a speed of 250 m.p.h. 

But his ultimate project was to get up high enough to prove that the earth was flat. (Something I believe he could have disproved on a commercial flight.) Instead, he demonstrated that that if you burn up your fuse up there alone, you may come crashing back down to earth. Sometimes death defying doesn't defy death.

For this last project, Hughes had a deal with the Science Channel to document it. Why something called the Science Channel would want to be associated with a flat-earther seems like a pretty good question. But while Hughes might have been mad, he was still open-minded.

“I expect to see a flat disk up there,...[but] I don’t have an agenda. If it’s a round Earth or a ball, I’m going to come down and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’m bad. It’s a ball, okay?’ ” 

And if you're wondering  how flat-earthers account for the oceans not sloshing over the sides, "many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in." So there.

But Mike Hughes was more than just a flat-earther. He really just liked pushing the edge of his own personal envelope. 

“It’s to convince people they can do things extraordinary with their lives,” he said. “Maybe it pushes people to do things they wouldn’t normally do with their lives that will maybe inspire someone else." 

Guess I'm just not the easily inspirable type.  

Anyway, it's easy to write "Mad" Mike Hughes off as a nutter, and consider his death a candidate for a Darwin Award. But, hey, he died doing what he loved, and there's something to be said for that. Maybe I'll die reading. Or doing an Extra Hard Soduku puzzle...

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How long have I been shower-singing "Rocket Man"? It's not on my regular playlist, but it does come up occasionally when my brain starts to shuffle. So I've been singing it for years. It's also a wonderful sing-along tune when it comes on the radio. Let alone at an Elton John concert. (My one and only was last fall.) Anyway, when I went to write the title of this post, for some reason I googled the lyrics. It's "burning up his fuse up here alone," and not "burning up his fuel up there alone," which is what I've been singing all these years. Who knew? You really do learn something new every day.