Man who thinks the earth is flat won't launch himself in a rocket he built in his own backyard

It appears we will need to wait a while longer to find out whether more than two millennia of thinkers and explorers — from Aristotle and Ferdinand Magellan, to Neil deGrasse Tyson and John Glenn — have been wrong about the shape of the Earth.

"Mad" Mike Hughes, limousine driver and self-proclaimed flat-Earther, announced that he had to delay his plan to launch himself 1,800 feet high in a rocket of his own making. The launch, which he has billed as a crucial first step toward ultimately photographing our disc-world from space, had been scheduled for Saturday — before the Bureau of Land Management got wind of the plan and barred him from using public land in Amboy, Calif.

Also, the rocket launcher he had built out of a used motor home "broke down in the driveway" on Wednesday, according to Hughes. He said in a YouTube announcement that they'd eventually gotten the launcher fixed — but the small matter of federal permission proved a more serious stumbling block (for now).

The BLM "informed me that they were not going to allow me to do the event there — at least at that location," Hughes said.

Hughes asserted that the BLM last year had tacitly left the matter of permissions to the Federal Aviation Administration, and "of course, they can't honestly approve it," he added. The FAA "just said, 'Well, we know that you're going to do it there.'"