LAKE WENTWORTH — It’s around 7 a.m. Friday, a crystal blue morning.
Only a slight chill hung over the 10-foot-high steel test rocket propped up in a fir-lined clearing near a remote logging road.
Eric Meier stands atop a wobbly yellow ladder to switch on the electronics in the rocket’s payload — a tiny digital camera behind an inch-square plexiglass window.
For the rocket’s launch, the airspace has been cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration of all aviation traffic for 20 miles around Lake Wentworth, about 10 miles northeast of Forks.
Meier throws another switch — and the rocket’s engine is ready to be launched at 1,000 pounds of thrust and more than 3,000 mph.
Moments later he turns on a battery-powered “spin rail” scaffolding that rotates the rocket at 300 rpm.
The spin adds stability to the rockets supersonic flight.
On a clear-cut hillside about 20,000 feet from the launch site, Meier’s partner and fellow aerospace engineer Phillip Storm stands ready for liftoff at the control center — his pickup truck.
Meier runs to his truck and drives it up to meet Storm for the launch.
With a fiery roar, the three-stage rocket blasts off on a flight that is supposed to take it about 55 miles into the heavens.
And then . . . failure.
Three wavy puffs of smoke streaked the sky — and a sonic boom brought home the fact that the rocket easily broke the sound barrier at more than 770 mph.
“It was hauling ass when it hit that third stage,” said Storm.
Said a visibly disappointed Storm after the unsuccessful launch:
“Our engines worked good, but . . .”
It was Forks-based Space Transport Corporation’s eighth attempt since November to successfully send up a two- or three-stage rocket in its challenge to ultimately launch a manned suborbital spacecraft.