Mike Hughes, 64, D.I.Y. Daredevil, Is Killed in Rocket Crash
The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called “Homemade Astronauts.”
Mike Hughes, a go-it-alone daredevil, limousine stunt driver and self-taught astronaut who professed to believe that the Earth was flat and who was known to supporters as Mad Mike, died in a rocket launch in the California desert on Saturday. He was 64.
Darren Shuster, Mr. Hughes’s publicist, confirmed his death. Mr. Shuster, who was not at the launch on Saturday, said his client’s last message to him that morning asked, “Is the media going to be there?”
Around 2 p.m. on Saturday, San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies were called to a rocket launch on private property in Barstow, Calif., about 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles. “A man was pronounced deceased after the rocket crashed in the open desert,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
