Flat-Earther
Just before the launch, 'Mad' Mike Hughes' steam-fueled rocket suffered a glitch, a fault in the actuator-- Representational Image Reuters/Joel Kowsky/NASA/Handout

Flat-Earther "Mad" Mike Hughes' efforts to launch himself in a steam-powered homemade rocket into the sky at 500mph have again hit a roadblock — this time due to a mechanical glitch that kept his rocket from taking off.

After a failure in November due to government interference, the 61-year old limo-driver was set to launch himself on a new vehicle and with a specifically curated trajectory on 3 February. However, things never really happened the way they were supposed to.

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Just before the launch, Hughes' steam-fueled rocket suffered a glitch, a fault in the actuator. As a result, instead of launching and going up to 1,800ft, the rocket didn't even ignite, Newsweek reported.

The only way to get the whole thing up and running was to make repairs from under the rocket, which could have proven very dangerous if done immediately, Hughes said in a video after the failed launch attempt.

"This ain't no joke, this thing's got about 10 different ways to kill you, ok?," he said in the clip. "I'm sorry to disappoint everyone, I did the best I can do. I manned up, I got in it."

Hughes did not immediately reveal when the launch will be attempted next but on Tuesday, after appearing in court for legal proceedings against several California government officials, the flat-Earther posted an update on Facebook.

He said, "The new actuator which is the part that stopped the launch will be complete this week and the new date will be kept a secret until a few hours before the launch".

Hughes, who sees no difference between science and science fiction, went up to 1,374ft in 2014 following which he became a proponent of the flat-Earth theory and started building a homemade rocket to fly 1,800ft up in the sky.

Though the flight, which he has been trying since November 2017, won't prove anything, it would give him enough publicity to fund his ultimate project, a multi-million dollar rocket-flight where he would go high enough (35,000ft to be exact) to see for himself and get a photographic proof of whether Earth is flat or a sphere as the entire scientific community claims.