In September 2017 the rapper B.o.B (real name Bobby Ray Simmons Jr.) asked the public for about $200,000 to put satellites into orbit so he could find out whether the Earth is curved. The answer was never in doubt. Our planet is a slightly flattened sphere: its size was worked out from the ground more than 2,000 years ago, sailors have gone all the way round it since the 1500s, and astronauts have photographed it whole from space since the late 1960s.
Several of those astronauts replied to him in public within days. Below is what the campaign asked for, what Terry Virts, Buzz Aldrin and Scott Kelly told him, why a skyline that looks flat proves nothing, and some simple checks anyone can do without buying a satellite.
What the “Show BoB The Curve” fundraiser asked for
The GoFundMe page went up in September 2017 under the title “Show BoB The Curve”. According to CNN, it aimed to raise around $200,000 to launch “multiple satellites into space” and look for the curvature with its own cameras. By the afternoon of 25 September it had collected $255. Wikipedia’s account of the episode adds that the rapper later raised the target to $1,000,000 so he could also use drones and weather balloons.
The fundraiser was the second round of a public argument. In January 2016 the Atlanta rapper began posting photos and questions to persuade his followers that the planet is flat, and that year he accepted a membership of The Flat Earth Society. One of the early posts showed a distant skyline and asked where the curve was:
The cities in the background are approx. 16miles apart... where is the curve ? please explain this pic.twitter.com/YCJVBdOWX7
— B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016
(This post is no longer available on X.)
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson answered him at the time, and later used an appearance on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore to sum up the problem: “Small sections of large curved surfaces will always look flat to little creatures that crawl upon it.” B.o.B hit back with a diss track, “Flatline”, released on 22 April 2016. The Anti-Defamation League criticised some of its lyrics for echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories. Tyson and his nephew Stephen, also a rapper, replied with their own track, “Flat to Fact”.
How Terry Virts, Buzz Aldrin and Scott Kelly answered
When news of the fundraiser spread on 27 September 2017, people who had actually seen the planet from orbit joined in. Terry Virts, a NASA astronaut who lived on the International Space Station in 2014 and 2015, offered to save the rapper his money with one short fact: he had flown around it.
I can save BoB a lot of money- The Earth is round. I flew around it. https://t.co/F7qAovPEng @bobatl @BBCWorld
— Terry Virts (@AstroTerry) September 27, 2017
Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot who became the second person to walk on the Moon in July 1969, followed within minutes. He chose a dictionary-style answer, defining an orbit as a curved path around a planet, star or moon.
I did too. It's called an orbit: the curved path of a celestial object around a star, planet, or moon. https://t.co/h8GQJadfxD
— Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) September 27, 2017
Scott Kelly, who spent almost a full year aboard the station in 2015 and 2016, sent a time-lapse of one complete trip around the Earth. The station circles the planet roughly every hour and a half, so the clip compresses about 90 minutes of sunrise, night and sunrise again into a few seconds. He also suggested a better use for any money raised: relief for Puerto Rico, which Hurricane Maria had devastated a week earlier.
Show you the curve? Here you go @bobatl! One full orbit around Earth. Maybe donate funds raised to #PuertoRicoRelief https://t.co/bhJSXfwYXL pic.twitter.com/rFAysS2clc
— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) September 27, 2017
Not every reply came from orbit. One sailor pointed out that crossing an ocean is enough to see the curve for yourself: the tops of tall clouds appear above the horizon long before their bases.
I've sailed round 1/2 of it & can confirm it's a globe! You can see the tops of high clouds over the horizon fir a start.
— Andy ™🤠🎶🇪🇺 (@andywash) September 27, 2017
(This post is no longer available on X.)
Why a flat-looking skyline is not evidence of a flat Earth
The January 2016 photo looks convincing at first glance, so it is worth walking through the geometry. The Earth’s radius is about 6,371 km. If your eyes were right at sea level, an object 16 miles (about 26 km) away would have roughly its bottom 50 metres hidden behind the bulge of the water or land in between. Raise your eyes just 10 metres, which is a low balcony, and your own horizon moves out to about 11 km. Only the last 15 km or so are then “behind the curve”, which hides around 16 metres. A city skyline full of towers taller than 100 metres stays easily visible.
Two more things make distant views look flatter than people expect. First, air bends light slightly downwards around the curve (atmospheric refraction), which usually lifts faraway objects into view. Second, a camera’s frame covers only a narrow slice of the horizon, and the curve across that slice is far too slight to notice by eye.
A popular rule of thumb, “8 inches per mile squared”, is often misused in these debates. It gives the drop below a flat line drawn from a point on the surface, not how much of a distant object is hidden from someone standing above that surface. Applied to a photo taken from a hill or a building, it predicts far more “missing” skyline than there should be, and then the real photo looks like a contradiction when it is not.
How people knew the Earth was round long before satellites
Greek scholars accepted a spherical Earth by the 5th century BC. Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes of Cyrene went further and measured it. At noon on the summer solstice the Sun shone straight down into a well at Syene (modern Aswan), while in Alexandria, further north, a vertical rod still cast a shadow at an angle of about 7.2 degrees, one fiftieth of a circle. Surveyors put the distance between the cities at about 5,000 stadia, so he multiplied by fifty and got roughly 250,000 stadia for the full circumference. Depending on which length of stade he used, that lands within about one per cent of the modern figure of 40,075 km at the equator. Two small errors in his assumptions happened to cancel out, but the method was sound.
Other clues were in plain sight: the Earth’s shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is always curved, and travellers saw new stars rise as they went south. The Magellan–Elcano expedition (1519–1522) then sailed all the way round.
The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat is itself a myth. Historians trace much of it to Washington Irving’s 1828 biography of Columbus, which invented scenes of churchmen arguing against a round Earth. The real argument with Columbus was about the planet’s size, and his critics were right that it was much bigger than he claimed.
Photographs settled any remaining doubt for the public. William Anders took Earthrise from Apollo 8 in December 1968, and the crew of Apollo 17 captured The Blue Marble, the full sunlit disc of the planet, on 7 December 1972 from about 29,400 km away.
Did the campaign ever launch anything?
Reports at the time showed only a few hundred dollars raised in the first days, far short of any target, and we could find no reliable record of a satellite, balloon or drone flight paid for by the campaign. B.o.B did not change his mind in public either. Two days after the astronauts replied, he suggested that discouragement was a sign someone was hiding something:
People usually discourage you from doing something when they have something to hide 😉
— B.o.B (@bobatl) September 29, 2017
That reply shows why evidence alone rarely ends a conspiracy belief. If every piece of contrary proof is read as part of the cover-up, nothing can count against the idea. The more useful question to ask a doubter is a gentle one: what result would change your mind? If the honest answer is “nothing”, the conversation is no longer about the shape of the Earth.
Simple checks you can do yourself
You do not need orbit to see the curve’s effects. A few low-cost observations, all repeatable, point the same way:
- Watch ships with binoculars. On a clear day at the coast, a ship heading out disappears from the bottom up, and zooming in does not bring the hull back.
- Check the Pole Star. In the Northern Hemisphere, Polaris sits higher in the sky the further north you are; its angle above the horizon is roughly equal to your latitude. On a flat plane it would barely move.
- Call a friend abroad. When it is noon for you it can be midnight for someone on the other side of the world. One Sun lighting half a ball explains time zones; a flat disc does not.
- Look at a lunar eclipse. The edge of the Earth’s shadow crossing the Moon is curved every time, whatever direction the Moon is in.
Each of these is the kind of evidence Eratosthenes would have recognised, and none of them costs $200,000.
Sources: CNN, 25 September 2017: B.o.B’s $200,000 flat-Earth fundraiser; IFLScience (James Felton): astronauts respond to B.o.B; Wikipedia: B.o.B; Wikipedia: Eratosthenes; Wikipedia: Spherical Earth; Wikipedia: Myth of the flat Earth; Wikipedia: The Blue Marble. Tweets by Terry Virts, Buzz Aldrin, Scott Kelly and B.o.B as embedded above.
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