NASA Astronauts Respond To ‘Flat Earth’ Rapper BoB Fundraising Campaign

NASA astronauts are trying to help the rapper B.o.B., who has taken heat lately for claiming that the Earth is flat instead of round.

Several NASA astronauts responded after the rapper, whose Twitter icon is a flat Earth, opened a GoFundMe page to raise money to “purchase and launch one, if not multiple, satellites into space” to “find the curve” of the Earth.

“I can save BoB a lot of money,” astronaut Terry Virts tweeted. “The Earth is round. I flew around it.”

Virts has a couple of decades with NASA under his belt, including as a boarder on the International Space Station and as a pilot for the decommissioned space shuttle Endeavor. He has spent more than 200 days in space and almost 20 total hours on spacewalks — when an astronaut leaves the ISS to perform work on its exterior.

Even the second man on the moon got in on the action. Buzz Aldrin, who was part of the Apollo 11 team and stepped onto the lunar surface after Neil Armstrong, quoted Virts’ tweet about the flat Earth fundraising campaign and how he flew around the Earth.

“I did too,” Aldrin wrote. “It’s called an orbit: the curved path of a celestial object around a star, planet, or moon.”

B.o.B.’s GoFundMe campaign has a goal of $1 million dollars to launch the satellites and document everything. Five days into the campaign he had raised less than $3,000.

It was launched a day after another tweet seemingly suggested crowdfunding a satellite to search for the edge of the Earth and B.o.B. replied, “Actually that’s a great idea.”

The Flat Earth Society has supported his efforts.

The responses from the astronauts are not the only time a space expert has called out the rapper for supporting flat Earth theory — astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has also gotten involved.

In January 2016, B.o.B. had tweeted a photo of himself where he was standing on a hill at sunset and captioned the photo, “The cities in the background are approx. 16 miles apart … where is the curve? Please explain this.”

Tyson replied to the comment and got into a discussion about it on Twitter.

“Flat Earth is a problem only when people in charge think that way,” he said. “No law stops you from regressively basking in it.”

He also referred to the rapper as being five centuries behind everyone else in his thinking — referencing the fact that although the ancient Greeks believed the Earth was round, their knowledge was lost for many years and it wasn’t until after the Dark Ages that people re-discovered this fact.

B.o.B.’s flat Earth claim — and a connected skepticism about whether astronauts are actually in space — is not the only conspiracy theory he seemingly supports; he has also tweeted against childhood vaccinations.