> 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.