He styles himself "Mad" Mike Hughes. But Mad Mike Hughes is not content with just one nickname, so he aspires to a second one—"King of the Daredevils." Given what Mad Mike plans to do this coming Saturday, it is hard to begrudge him either moniker. Mad Mike has built a rocket, the X-2 "SkyLimo," and on April 2 he plans to set this rocket up on one side of the Palo Duro Canyon, light that sucker up, fly 3,500 feet into the air, and reach a maximum speed of 350mph.

Palo Duro Canyon cuts across the Texas Panhandle. At 70 miles long and with a depth of nearly 900 feet, it is no mere ditch. The artist Georgia O'Keeffe lived nearby almost a century ago in the towns of Amarillo and Canyon, and she loved to visit the great red crack in the flat plains by car or wagon. O’Keeffe referred to the sight as a “slit in nothingness.”

Rather than become nothingness himself, Mad Mike hopes to survive this adventure in his homemade rocket. "I’m not a crazy guy," he told Ars. "I have a high IQ. I know the dangers. But this is a whole new world. I’m in uncharted territory with this thing."

Ars reached Mad Mike by telephone on Monday at his "rocket ranch," which is also his domicile, about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles in Apple Valley. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't talk long." He's still putting the final touches on his steam rocket and had to finish by Tuesday evening when he's due to load up for the 19-hour drive to the Texas Panhandle.

Mad Mike talked long enough to provide some basic background. For his day job he drives a limo, and in 2002 he achieved some measure of fame for making a Guinness World Record jump of 103 feet in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limo. But he aspired to be more. The one true King of the Daredevils would have to go beyond the feats and stunts of Evel Knievel, who died in 2007. Knievel himself tried to jump a canyon—Snake River, in Idaho—back in 1974 in a steam-powered rocket. He failed when a parachute deployed prematurely.

Mad Mike does not plan to fail, but when he started on this project he was no rocket scientist. He had to learn. He spent thousands of hours, he says, reading up on rockets. "I self taught myself," Mad Mike explained. "Luckily the Internet came along, and I didn’t have to go to the library any more." He learned the trade and eventually built his own version of a steam rocket, in which water is stored at high pressure and temperature, and as it escapes through a rocket nozzle it produces thrust.

Mad Mike's SkyLimo rocket fires for about four seconds with an initial thrust of approximately 4,000 pounds. That increases to about 7,000 pounds at its peak before rapidly falling off. "It’s a bad boy," he said. "You’re unleashing the devil with this thing. That’s the only way to describe it."

Mad Mike has done this largely by himself with the help of a few friends. "I've had to do this on my own dime," he said. "The only way I can do this is by making everything myself. Evel Knievel spent $600,000 on his rocket. I make $15 an hour. You do the math."

(Ars did the math. To raise $600,000, Mad Mike would have to work 40,000 hours, or about 19.2 years of 40-hour work weeks. Presumably he also pays taxes and eats once or twice a day, so either way it's safe to say he's spent less than Knievel did.)

When Mad Mike pulls into Amarillo later this week, he'll set up his 40-foot ramp on the back side of his motor home along the Palo Duro Canyon. On Saturday, he will unleash that "bad boy." If all goes well, he will ride the rocket over the quarter-mile-wide canyon. He'd like to go as far as a half mile, he said. After the rocket fuel runs out a parachute will deploy and, hopefully, slow Mad Mike's descent to 15mph before a 3-foot collapsible nose cone absorbs most of the impact.

And that is not the extent of the would-be King of the Daredevils' ambition. On July 4, Mad Mike wants to jump a mile at the Willow Springs International Raceway north of Los Angeles. He's even talking about ballooning up to 20,000 feet or so, releasing the balloon, and strapping a rocket to his shoulders in order to fly all the way to 62 miles above the planet, into outer space, before coming back to Earth.

But first he must survive Palo Duro Canyon. There is no question that Mad Mike is a brave man, someone with more courage than most. And he dreams the American Dream with all of his heart. Really, though, we had to ask, isn't he at least a little bit nervous about strapping himself into that rocket? Of course he is! "I wish it was already done," he admitted. "I wish I was having cocktails in a bar in Amarillo with a girl right now, talking about this. But I’ve got to go do it first."