Gates was working on a roof when he fell through a skylight and plummeted 30 feet to his death. Aside from his four guest appearances on the Discovery Channel hit series Mythbusters Gates was the owner of firm Gateco Electric.

Gates was working with his brother, the President and CEO of Xirrus Inc., on a website owned by his brother, Dirk Gates’ corporation. Both Erik and his brother were interested in rocketry to the point where they ran an amateur rocket website showcasing their rockets.

Erik Gates, who is most famous for having appeared on several episodes of Mythbusters in his capacity as a rocketry expert, died in a freak accident when he apparently fell off a roof where he was working through a skylight thirty feet to his death.

Erik Gates was able to use his expertise in rocketry to appear as a guest expert on four Mythbuster episodes.

The first was the pilot, when the Mythbusters tested an urban legend about a man who strapped a rocket to the back of his pickup truck and fired it off. According to the legend, the man smacked into the side of a mountain, unable to stop or turn.

The second episode was about the Ming Dynasty Astronaut, which explored the story of a Medieval Chinese inventor who strapped a number of rockets to a chair, sat it in, and then ignited the rockets to fly through the air.

The third episode explored the bullet proofing properties of water. Also the episode tested whether a person on a swing could swing three hundred and sixty degrees all the way around. At one point rockets were attached to a test dummy on the swing to make it swing all the way around.

The last episode Erik Gates was on concerned the Confederate rocket. There is a story that during the closing days of the American Civil War, the Confederates were working on a rocket with which to bombard Washington DC. The result was that, using technology available at the time, the Confederates could not have hit Washington from Richmond.

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