The Vancouver Sun, BC, Canada
Oct 11 2013
Beirut, we have liftoff
Film highlights successes of Lebanese rocket builders during space
race’s infancy
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH OCTOBER 11, 2013
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.
The first suggestion had been gunpowder but experiments on a couple of
30-centimetre cardboard rockets had resulted in explosions rather than
the perfect chemical reaction required to send a vessel several miles
into the sky.
Then, after more lab work and guidance from their teacher, a brilliant
young math and physics lecturer called Manoug Manougian, they’d
decided the solution was a mixture of zinc and sulphur. But they’d
still not worked out the correct proportions.
The chemicals would burn, but they needed to find a combination that
would give the rocket enough thrust. Manougian was also 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 60-cm 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.
It was 1961 and the Soviet Union and the United States 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 math – are finally being recognized 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 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 U.S. for a long time now –
currently as a math professor at the University of South Florida.
Armenian by blood, he was born in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1935,
but 10 years later his parents relocated to Jericho in the West Bank
to escape the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. 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.”
As a child with little else to do, Manougian would climb to the top of
Mount Quarantania – said to be the Biblical “Mount of Temptation” –
and look out over the vastness of the land around him and upwards to
the stars wondering why he couldn’t fly to the moon. ” After
graduating from St. George’s School, Jerusalem, he deferred a
scholarship to study at the University of Texas at Austin in order to
help prepare other St. George’s students for their exams in math,
physics and chemistry. His future wife, Josette Masson, was one of
those students.
In 1960, in Jerusalem, Manougian and Masson married and that autumn he
joined the faculty of Haigazian College in Beirut. 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. Again, they went up to the top of the
mountain.
“Across from us was a valley; no villages, no houses,” Manougian
recalls, “so I figured it was safe to launch in that direction.” This
time, though, instead of going where he had anticipated, the rocket
zoomed off behind the assembled dignitaries and students. “It was made
of metal and I was so worried it could hurt somebody. Then I noticed
this crowd coming out of a Greek Orthodox church, and suddenly part of
the rocket stuck in one of the rocks in front of the building.”
Luckily nobody was injured.
But 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-foot summit in the Mount Lebanon range used by the
country’s military. With the loan of a mountain, his next challenge
was to launch a multistage rocket that would separate in flight and
travel a lot further – up to 10 miles.
Budget was an issue from the beginning: where NASA would spend $23
billion on its manned space programs in the ’60s, and the Soviet Union
between $5 and $10 billion, the Haigazian College Rocket Society
project cost around $300,000, Manougian estimates.
Perhaps naively, Manougian says his excitement seemed to circumvent
any doubts he may have had that the army was using his society’s
technological adventures for its own ends.
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.
“I remember waking up in the middle of the night,” Manougian says.
“Josette asked what the hell was going on and I said I’ve figured it
out: I needed to place a battery in between the two rockets. And as
long as the first stage is not generating any acceleration – because
it’s run out of propellent – it will slow down for a fraction of a
second, forcing the second stage to ignite. It was so simple.”
The difference between a singlestage rocket and a two-stage rocket was
vast. 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.”
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 (about 12,500 U.K. 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, surrounded by colleagues, students, representatives
of the Lebanese government and military, and the country’s media.
Even though the society’s singlestage rockets had been a success, he
wasn’t sure if this latest one would just explode on the launcher. His
heart was beating fast as he watched the device shoot upwards. “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.
By now the team had begun designing its first three-stage rocket,
capable of reaching the thermosphere, which begins at around 80
kilometres 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, something Manougian
describes as “perhaps the most telling of expressions of pride in the
project.”
After Manougian returned to Texas, the country’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
program and the government was told to halt all rocket activities.
Hadjithomas and fellow Lebanese filmmaker Khalil Joreige stumbled upon
Manougian’s story in 2000 and found very few people they spoke to who
had lived through the period remembered the Cedar rockets at all.
At the end of the film, we see Hadjithomas and Joreige themselves
spearheading an effort to have a lifesize 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.
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Beirut+have+liftoff/9025545/story.html