![]() After apogee, a reserve supply of helium would be used to inflate a balloon-parachute hybrid called a ballute. The idea was to carry Mike roughly 20 miles aloft in a gargantuan helium balloon before igniting the rocket-a Cold War-era launch system known as a rockoon. The calculations to launch a payload into space, whether a satellite or a human being, have been well understood ever since 1944, when a Nazi V-2 designed by Wernher von Braun first left Earth’s atmosphere. Grinning fiercely, Waldo told me, “I’m going to send this guy into space, and people are going to go, ‘Two fucking hillbillies living in Apple Valley built a spaceship, promoted it themselves, hooked it to a balloon, and launched him into space.’”īut the more Waldo talked, the more credible the project sounded. I listened skeptically as Waldo sketched out the scenario in the wood-paneled living room of Mike’s small, dark, sparsely furnished house, while four cats slinked shamelessly over the sofa and coffee table. Mike and Waldo were an odd couple-a bantam rooster with a shock of gray-white hair and a solid redwood with tattooed biceps. And they planned to do it with a spacecraft built at El Ranchito Rakete. Waldo intended to use a hydrogen peroxide rocket to allow Mike to breach the so-called Karman line, 62 miles above Earth’s surface. Felix Baumgartner and Alan Eustace had spent a gazillion dollars and years of preparation on sophisticated equipment and huge engineering teams to ride balloons up 24 and 26 miles, respectively, and then parachute back to terra firma. Last spring, Waldo called to tell me he’d hatched a crazily ambitious plan: He wanted to send Mike into space. ![]() For me, the “Research Flat Earth” livery on the rocket was tangible proof that the project was nothing more than a circus sideshow, and I was relieved that I’d stayed away. This time around, Mike had generated buzz by claiming that he believed the Earth was flat, and he raised money by spinning the flight as an experiment to prove it. Four months later, after several launches were aborted, there was a successful flight (followed by another brutal landing that left Mike pissing into a bottle for three days because he couldn’t make it to the bathroom). In 2017, Mike and Waldo trucked a new rocket deep into the Mojave Desert to a barren stretch of land near the tiny Route 66 outpost of Amboy. A crew member was hurt so badly that part of his leg was later amputated. But who cared if somebody who’d christened himself “Mad Mike” went 2,000 or 4,000 feet high in a homemade rocket that was just as likely to kill him as it was to get off the launch pad? Predictably, everything went wrong during the next attempt, when Mike’s latest steam rocket ignited prematurely, before he’d even climbed into the cockpit. And what was the point? Trying to set a land speed record or breaking the sound barrier struck me as goals worth aspiring to. Periodically, Waldo would call me with updates. But Mike wanted to fly higher, faster, farther. Waldo cajoled me into writing a brief, lighthearted story about the episode.
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