■ A man with a rocket seeking to prove Earth is flat postpones his experiment.

Launch postponed, will move to private land

A California man who planned to launch himself 1,800 feet Saturday in a homemade scrap-metal rocket — in an effort to “prove” that Earth is flat — said he is postponing the experiment after he couldn’t get permission from a federal agency to do so on public land.

Instead, Mike Hughes said the launch will take place sometime next week on private property, albeit still in Amboy, California, an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert along historic Route 66.

“It’s still happening. We’re just moving it … down the road,” Hughes told The Washington Post on Friday. “This is what happens any time you have to deal with any kind of government agency.”

Hughes claimed the Bureau of Land Management said he couldn’t launch his rocket as planned Saturday in Amboy. He also claimed the federal agency had given him verbal permission more than a year ago, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Representatives from the BLM and the FAA did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Hughes said he had originally intended to arrive Wednesday in Amboy to start setting up the rocket. The BLM’s denial, along with some technical difficulties — a motor in his modified motor home quit working for a day — threw a wrench into his plans, according to Hughes.

“I don’t see (the launch) happening until about Tuesday, honestly,” he said. “It takes three days to set up. … You know, it’s not easy because it’s not supposed to be easy.”

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

Hughes’ ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above 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 roundEarth 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.”

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.