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Seeking to prove that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Mike Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

“It’ll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday’s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I’m really behind the eight ball.”

That said, Hughes isn’t a totally unproven engineer. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results.

“Okay, Waldo. 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!” someone yells in a test fire video from 2012.

There’s a brief hiss of boiling water, then . . . nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a thick cloud of steam belches out toward the camera.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Ariz.

As seen in a YouTube video, the flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning from the remains of the rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.

And the 2014 flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday’s mile-long attempt.

And it was based on round-Earth technology.

Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.

It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign — “From Garage to Outer Space!” — that mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts, and was themed after a NASCAR event.

“We want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,” Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, Calif., living room, which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.

“They have not put a man in space yet,” Hughes said. “There are 20 different space agencies here in America, and I’m the last person that’s put a man in a rocket and launched it.” Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch himself from a California racetrack that year as the first step in his steam-powered leap toward space.

The Kickstarter raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.

Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to fly over Texas in a “SkyLimo.” But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty of funding his dreams on a chauffeur’s meager salary.

A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community Web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.

“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I’m a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”

The host sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket, he noted, whereas astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.

“John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons,” Hughes agreed. “Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.”

The host talked of “Elon Musk’s fake reality,” and Hughes talked of “anti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.” After half an hour of this, the host told his 300-some listeners to back Hughes’s exploration of space.

While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disc ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.

What’s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.

“We need an individual who’s not compromised by the government,” the host told Hughes. “And you could be that man.”

A flat-Earth GoFundMe subsequently raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.

By November, the AP reported, his $20,000 rocket had a fancy coat of Rust-Oleum paint and “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” inscribed on the side.

While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the AP reported, Hughes will be making adjustments right up to Saturday’s launch.

But he won’t be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And even if it’s a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disc. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into outer space.

“It’s scary as hell,” Hughes told the AP. “But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

This is true. And yet some hope to live to see its edges.

Could 2,000 years of belief be wrong? Are we in fact living on a disc rather than a globe? One believer from the Flat Earth Society is determined to find out. "Mad" Mike Hughes is all set to build his own rocket to see for himself that the Earth is flat.

For the last 50 years, we've been able to view pictures of the Earth from space, which might seem like all the proof you need to see that our planet is in fact round. But the awareness of how easily images can be doctored and the growth of internet conspiracy theories appears to have fueled a resurgence of belief in a flat Earth.

At the same time, there's a lack of understanding of the science that has long been used to demonstrate that we live on a globe, without the need to leave it. I wish Hughes well with his endeavor, as he has at least been willing to try and prove his theory. Perhaps if more people really could see for themselves the evidence, we might be able to reverse this worrying trend. A good place to start would be by making sure children have the chance to try out simple experiments in school.

One of the best documented methods for determining the Earth's roundness was first performed (to our knowledge) by the ancient Greeks. This was achieved by comparing the shadows of sticks in different locations. When the sun was directly overhead in one place, the stick there cast no shadow. At the same time in a city around 500 miles north, the stick there did cast a shadow.

If the Earth were flat then both sticks should show the same shadow (or lack of) because they would be positioned at the same angle towards the sun. The ancient Greeks found the shadows were different because the Earth was curved and so the sticks were at different angles. They then used the difference in these angles to calculate the circumference of the Earth. They managed to get it to within 10% of the true value – not bad for around 250 B.C.

Another piece of evidence for a globe is the difference between the night skies in the northern and southern hemispheres. The view is completely different because the Earth beneath you is pointing in a different direction. If the Earth were flat, the view should be the same. This can be made even easier by simply comparing when it is night and day in each country.

You can observe the planets as well. They all rotate, and watching over the course of a few days gives a clear picture they are spherical rather than flat. The chance that most of the planets are spherical but the Earth is flat seems very unlikely.

But when science experiments are performed incorrectly they can appear to give the opposite result. If they are shared through social media, these false ideas can be spread quickly with no one to point out their flaws. One common example is the Bedford Level experiment, a form of which was first carried out in 1838 and used to "prove" the Earth was flat for over 30 years before an explanation was found.

This experiment involved placing a marker at a set height at either end of a canal about six miles long. If the Earth is round, then one marker should appear lower than the other when viewed at the same time through a telescope because the furthest marker would have fallen away with the curvature of the Earth. But it was reported that the markers are the same height, suggesting the Earth is actually flat. Modern day Flat Earth theorists still quote this experiment.

The problem is this doesn't take into account the optical effect of the air over the intervening water, which bends or "refracts" the light as it travels from the marker to the telescope and makes it look like they are the same height. The solution is to use multiple markers along the length of the canal which, when observed, all appear to be at different heights.

Perhaps the most impressive experiment that even schools can do today is to send a camera up in a high-altitude balloon. The footage will show that from a high-enough vantage point you can see the curvature of the Earth. This is what Mike Hughes will find if he ever makes his rocket work.

Ultimately, arguing on the internet is not the best way forward for any scientific endeavour. We need to provide the means for people to test these theories themselves and to understand the results they get.