Good on him for being an explorer and pushing the limits. Sorry it had to come to a end :(
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it.
See: all of organized religion.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow
... And the (one) satellite it successfully launched is still in orbit, nearly 50 years later.
Presumably Hughes's belief system demanded that all his silver exist in coin form, hoarded and buried in the backyard, or something.
I can say that I'm only comforted thinking that he died doing what he loved. If only we all could be so lucky.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Douchebag%20...
The limits of stuntmanship.