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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