Beirut: A few years before they became the first Arabs to send a rocket into space, the members of the Haigazian College science club, in Beirut, encountered a problem. They had the materials to build a craft — some of which they’d bought with their own pocket money — but they still hadn’t produced a propellant.
Then, after more lab work and guidance from their teacher, a brilliant young maths and physics lecturer called Manoug Manougian, they’d decided the solution was a mixture of zinc and sulphur. But Manougian was aware they couldn’t possibly test it in their physics lab. They’d require space; somewhere away from people.
The family of one of the students owned a farm in the mountains, and over the course of several weekends, Manougian and his team went up there to experiment.
Finally, they came up with something that would generate enough energy to make their two-foot-tall rocket move. That first craft, called HCRS (for Haigazian College Rocket Society) and launched from the back of a rod stuck in the ground, climbed to 1,200 metres. “We have something,” Manougian thought.
It was 1961 and the Soviet Union and the US were four years into a dramatic space race which had begun with the former’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. But while millions of words have been written about the two superpowers’ attempts to gain supremacy of the solar system, precious little has been said about a third, highly unlikely, competitor.
Between 1961 and 1966, Manougian and his group of seven undergraduates ended up building 12 solid-fuel rockets — one of them so powerful it reached the thermosphere, now home to the International Space Station, and became national heroes in Lebanon.
Now, thanks to a new documentary, their extraordinary achievements — instigated by Manougian as an interesting way to teach his students basic principles of physics and maths — are finally being recognised by the rest of the world.
The film, The Lebanese Rocket Society, is also a poignant reminder of what could have been in a country that has been ravaged by war in the intervening years.
“We wanted to make a film about dreamers,” says the Lebanese co-director Joana Hadjithomas. “We needed to understand what kind of dreams people have had for our region.”
Manougian has lived and worked in the US for a long time now — currently as a mathematics professor at the University of South Florida.
Origins
Armenian by blood, he was born in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem in 1935, but 10 years later his parents relocated to Jericho in the West Bank.
It was around this time that he read Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, a gift from his uncle which he refers to as “the genesis of my fascination with science, rockets and space exploration”.
After the success of the first HCRS rocket in April 1961, Manougian and his team altered the position of the fins and re-constructed the nose cone of the rocket to give it better thrust. But the experiment failed, but no one was hurt.
After that, Manougian received a message from someone in the Lebanese government saying that future rockets could only be launched from specially designated launch pads.
He was offered the use of Mount Sannine, an 8,500-feet summit in the Mount Lebanon range used by the country’s military. He was also offered the expertise of Lebanese Army captain Joseph Wehbe, whose speciality was ballistics. The challenge for Manougian was to devise a solution so that all the propellent in the first stage was exhausted before the second stage ignited and separated.
The difference between a single-stage rocket and a two-stage rocket was vast. As Manougian puts it: It went from “kids doing these interesting things to a viable rocket which wasn’t a toy.”
Suddenly, the society’s work was not just some university sideline but a project of national import and, in August 1961, Manougian and his students were invited to meet the then-president of Lebanon, Fouad Chehab. “He said he was very proud that such scientific experiments were being done in his country — and he ended up saying he was going to support us financially.”
Bigger challenge
Manougian says he was nervous that the financial aid being discussed could end up coming from the Lebanese military and he was relieved to find it was to come from the Ministry of Education instead — to the tune of 100,000 Lebanese pounds. The weather was beautiful the morning Manougian stood staring at his three-metre rocket, named Cedar 2, sitting on the launcher on the top of Mount Sannine. “It was a perfect launch,” he says, “and as the two stages separated the students screamed. I screamed: ‘It worked.’?”
With the name of the club now changed to the Lebanese Rocket Society, Manougian and his team were given an abandoned army artillery range at Dbayeh on the outskirts of Beirut, overlooking the Mediterranean. Manougian was interviewed on radio and television and their antics garnered front-page headlines.
By now the team had begun designing its first three-stage rocket, capable of reaching the thermosphere, which begins at around 50 miles above the Earth’s surface. Cedar 3 was launched in November 1962 to mark Lebanese Independence Day. The following year postage stamps were issued to mark the launch of Cedar 4.
In early 1964, while Manougian was on a sabbatical from Haigazian, studying for a Master’s degree in Texas, one of his students experimented with some dangerous chemicals which exploded and set fire to the physics lab.
Accident
The student lost an eye, received third-degree burns and permanent damage to one of his arms. On returning to Beirut, Manougian was devastated and considered ending the project. Instead, he moved the entire operation to the army workshop for safety.
After Manougian returned to Texas, Beirut’s interest in rockets continued and in 1967 Lebanon launched Cedar 10. But in the wake of the Six Day War the West was no longer prepared to tolerate such a programme and the government was told to halt all rocket activities.
Hadjithomas and fellow Lebanese filmmaker Khalil Joreige stumbled upon Manougian’s story in 2000.
Hadjithomas and Joreige also discovered that, although the rocket society’s achievements were huge, very few people they spoke to who had lived through the period remembered the Cedar rockets at all. “So the film became our journey to discover why nobody remembered it,” Hadjithomas says.
The filmmakers found that even the memories of the generation old enough to recall the rockets taking off from those mountains on the outskirts of Beirut had become clouded by decades of conflict.
At the end of the film, we see Hadjithomas and Joreige themselves spearheading an effort to have a life-size replica of the Cedar 4 rocket mounted on a plinth and placed in the grounds of Haigazian College (now Haigazian University) — a lasting monument to Manougian and the extraordinary club he founded. “We wanted to continue the gesture of the dreamers,” Joreige says. “To give physicality to this memory; and to say that we are able to continue dreaming today.”
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2013
