> Good on him for being an explorer and pushing the limits.

NO. Just, no. This guy willfully ignored the knowledge and expertise that came before him; both, in how to accomplish the task and the demonstratively provable physics that show his goals were folly.

If he just claimed that gravity was false and jumped off a cliff to the rocks below to prove it, it would just be "local idiot jumps to his death." Some how, if you add rockets and a flat earth conspiracy it gets praise?

No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.

> It’s not clear how strongly he held the conviction, or if he really believed it at all. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said Saturday that the “flat Earth thing … was a PR stunt we dreamed up” to get publicity and attract sponsors for the rockets that the self-taught engineer made in his garage at his home in Apple Valley, Calif.

https://archive.md/1QX2W#selection-2017.0-2017.330

Sounds like he wanted to build and ride rockets, and this was a way to get strangers to pay for it.

Interesting. That would make him much worse in my book. Now should I remember him as an irresponsible fraud or a mistaken fool?

It is one thing to be so misinformed as to believe a flat earth has any plausibility. It is another to reinforce people in this mistaken belief to take advantage of them!

I mean, he grifted a bunch of flat earther's into funding his hobby. That's a win in my book

That's because you think flat-earthers "deserve" being cheated because they're stupid. I wonder how you'd react to cons that exploit your own ignorance.

In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it. By adopting their beliefs as his own, he crossed into that zone. If he'd just announced that he'll check curvature for them, that would have been alright.

Flat Earther's are more convicted than stupid. They're more than welcome to give money to anyone they please.

> In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it.

See: all of organized religion.

It's not fraud if you believe it yourself. Sure there are frauds in organized religion, but that doesn't make the religions as a whole a fraud.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. I love eccentric people but he wasn't likely to make any contributions to science; rather, he was a prop on a 'science TV' channel that that has very little science and lots of 'mysterious mysteries of strange mystery' - their top show right now is about the curse of the Bermuda triangle.

The glorification of guys like this is part of why we have disease outbreaks due to people's unwillingness to vaccinate and why every attempt to have a serious public discussion about climate change is overrun by denialists and trolls.

> This guy willfully ignored the knowledge and expertise that came before him;

This is true for all pioneers - the successful and the unsuccessful. Everything from airplanes to vaccines to the age of european exploration is a result of guys willfully ignoring the knowledge and expertise before them.

> No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.

I suppose except the "tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems" put a man on the moon, created the internet and the modern world.

If you are going to blame something for the failures, you should credit it also for the successes.

> This is true for all pioneers

He wasn't a pioneer, though. It's one thing when people say it can't be physically done, and the people talking have no theoretical basis to support it. People said it would never be possible to fly, but they has zero physics to back up the statement.

It's another when it has been physically done and the physics behind it is well understood. If he believe he was building a faster than engine using some new gravmetric-eletromagnetic effect, well more power to him. We have an ample amount of history on rockets, how to compute the physical performance of them, and a multitude of failure scenarios. This was ignored.

When it came to putting a man on the moon, we used the might of our education to predict everything we could and used hindsight when we failed. Importantly, we built into the systems things that would tell us what was happening so if there was a failure we could learn to not make the same mistake again. Rocket systems fail, which is why you launch them without people first.

One thing to tinker, another to claim that a steam-powered rocket would ever get to high altitude. Nevermind flat Earth, that's just setting your face against engineering.

If you squint at it the right way, the UK's Black Arrow launch vehicle was steam-powered; it used HTP (85-98% hydrogen peroxide) as an oxidizer, which decomposes to oxygen plus superheated steam on its way into the engine (the oxygen was then combusted with RP-1 fuel). The steam contributes a fair amount of reaction mass:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow

... And the (one) satellite it successfully launched is still in orbit, nearly 50 years later.

You probably know this, but one can quite successfully skip the kerosene entirely and just use peroxide as a monopropellant with a silver catalyst.

Presumably Hughes's belief system demanded that all his silver exist in coin form, hoarded and buried in the backyard, or something.

117 seconds specific impulse [1] is miserable. It is possible [2] to reach orbit with that, but not efficiently.

1 - http://www.astronautix.com/h/h2o2.html

2 - https://space.stackexchange.com/a/8720

I believe that we (the UK) are the only nation to develop and test a orbit-capable launch vehicle and then scrap it?

This reminds me that there's a company claiming to be developing a steam-powered booster for orbital launches. Scott Manley did a video about them a while back [1]. Where this stands on the spectrum between a scam and a real thing remains to be seen, but they did seem to be convincing enough to get some investments and build a test rig.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT9HBkWGg7s

The major distinguishing factors between a scam and an also ran in my opinion are that for something to be a scam the people running it have to be aware that it will not work and that they have not ignored any expert advice telling them that it will not work in sufficiently clear terms that they can't claim that it is just naysaying.

Plenty of people that relieved investors from their funds were unaware that what they were building was a scam.

Plenty of people working for companies that built stuff that didn't work were not aware of the fact that it could not work until they themselves established that.

Plenty of successes where there were people saying 'this can't possibly work' right up until the time that it did, in fact, work.

Theranos, Moller sky car, Ubeam (now renamed to SonicEnergy in an attempt to leave their past behind them) -> clearly scams.

This particular steam powered rocket is not a scam in the sense that it did not attempt to pass the risk or the eventual results onto others. It is merely very stupid, and it should serve as an object lesson in that if you are trying to do something in your backyard that normally has budgets in the 10's to 100's of millions that you are likely not going to succeed. Finally, it should teach people that your tests of vehicles of any kind that go up should be done unmanned as long as possible.

You know, I had some serious hopes that he'd actually find inspiration to pursue more mainstream rocket design through this hobby and use his experience operating on the fringes to make some interesting inroads in the mainstream.

I can say that I'm only comforted thinking that he died doing what he loved. If only we all could be so lucky.

"explorer and pushing the limits" Which limits exactly? According to the article he planed to go up to 5000 feet. That's a "rent a Cessna and pay your pilot buddy to take you up" territory.

The limits of what a human is willing to do. Note that his title isn’t “rocket scientist” but “daredevil”. When you compare getting into a rocket you built on your own to riding a bike across the Grand Canyon, well, Evel Knievel seems tame.

You are only a daredevil if you win. Otherwise you are a losedevil

I think you misspelled "Evel": ;)

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Douchebag%20...

Or buy a weather balloon and stick a camera on it...

> Which limits exactly?

The limits of stuntmanship.

I score it somewhere between "Bodhi riding the giant wave at the end of 'Point Break'" and "Reichelt Testing his Flight Suit from the Eiffel Tower" on the tragedy scale.