FORKS — Two aerospace engineers plan to take their second shot at launching an unmanned transport rocket into space on Oct. 9, this time from the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay.
“It’s an alternate launch site we were looking at before,” said one of the engineers, Eric Meier, on Wednesday.
“The Makah tribe has approved the launch site, and they are looking to work together with us,” Meier said in a telephone interview from Pasadena, Calif., after he attended the successful flight of the rival SpaceShipOne rocket plane over the Mojave Desert on Wednesday morning.
The rocket plane was designed by aerospace engineer Bert Rutan and financed for more than $20 million by billionaire Paul Allen.
Along with Space Transport Corp. — the Forks company owned by Phillip Storm and Meier — and several other burgeoning commercial aerospace firms worldwide, Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, is a contender for the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
The prize money will go to the first company to successfully launch a manned spacecraft to the edge of space twice within two weeks by year’s end.
Space Transport’s Neah Bay launch site was chosen after Storm and Meier ran into opposition from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, whose officials barred them from launching over the federally protected sanctuary from privately owned bluff property south of Queets.
Sanctuary officials fear pollution from solid rocket fuel, which Meier contends burns up and is not toxic to the environment.
The first Rubicon failed at launch, broke apart and fell into the Pacific off Queets on Aug. 8.
