BEIRUT, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
The Sunday Telegraph (London)
October 6, 2013
During the Sixties, America and the USSR competed for supremacy of the
solar system. But history has overlooked a third space race contestant
– a group of seven students at a university in Lebanon
by Alex Hannaford
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 12in-long 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 maths 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
2ft-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 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 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 Univer-sity 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 theWest
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. “The idea
was fascinating,” he says. “And I realised there shouldn’t be any
boundary as to where we could go in the universe.” 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 maths, physics and
chemistry. His future wife, Josette Masson, was one of those students,
and in 1956 the pairfinally headed to the US – Masson to Ohio for work,
and Manougian to Texas to further his studies.
In 1959, Manougian visited Masson in Cleveland, spending the summer
working in the city’s steel mills. After a strike closed the mill,
his boss told him to keep busy and Manougian took the opportunity
to design and build his first single-stage rocket. With no way of
accessing propellent, he knew he’d have to wait until he got back to
Lebanon to launch it.
The following year, in Jerusalem,Manougian and Masson married and that
autumn he joined the faculty of Haigazian College in Beirut. Many
of his students were the children of survivors of the 1915 Armenian
genocide, whose parents had moved to Lebanon to escape the atrocities.
The American University of Beirut was the country’s leading educational
institution at the time but even it wasn’t known for science and
technology. “During the Sixties there was calm, politically, and
Lebanon was happy producing businesspeople and doctors from the
university’s medical school, but in terms of science not much was
happening,” says Manougian. “There were few research projects.”
The young lecturer was asked to head up the student science club at
Haigazian; he immediately set them the task of building a rocket. He
was, he says, driven by two challenges: first, to realise his dream
of designing and launching multistage rockets, and, second, to get
his students excited about science, technology, engineering and maths.
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. My
entire concern was getting this thing off the ground.” This time,
though, instead of going where he had anticipated, the rocket zoomed
off behind the assembled dignitaries and students. “The entire student
body, the president [of Haigazian College] and everyone else just
stood there looking from the top of the mountain to see where it was
going to land,” Manougian says.
“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 8,500ft summit in
the Mount Lebanon range used by the country’s military. “They even
offered to send a jeep to carry our equipment,” Manougian says. With
the loan of a mountain, his next challenge was to launch a multi-stage
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
$23billion on its manned space programmes in the Sixties, and the
Soviet Union between $5 and $10billion, for the six years of its
existence, the Haigazian College Rocket Society project cost around
$300,000,Manougian estimates. Nasa, of course, was attempting to
land a man on the moon, not merely to send a rocket on a suborbital
flight, but nevertheless, in contrast with the space agency’s 400,000
employees, Manougian had seven students who hadn’t yet graduated, at
a tiny university in a country with a population of barely two million.
Manougian spent part of his own salary on rocket parts; he pulled a
favour from a fellow Armenian living in Beirut who provided the metal
tubes needed to manufacture the rocket’s shell and he also welded them
for free. “[The Armenian community] became so excited that here was
an Armenian guy and an Armenian college doing something that nobody
else in the Middle East was doing,” he says. He was also offered the
expertise of Lebanese Army captain Joseph Wehbe, whose speciality
was ballistics. Perhaps naively, Manougian says his excitement seemed
to circumvent any doubts he may have had that the army was using his
society’s intrepid 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 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 thenpresident 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).
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 single-stage 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.
Manougian was interviewed on radio and television and their antics
garnered front-page headlines.
One article said the two-stage Cedar launched its four-minute flight
on a 110km trajectory before splashing down in the Mediterranean.
“With the setting sun glistening on its redcoloured sides… the 350kg
rocket climbed slowly from the launch pad into the southwestern sky –
leaving a vapour trail across the Bay of Beirut.”
Inspired by news that the Soviet Union had sent the first human,
Yuri Gagarin into space, Manougian considered sending a mouse up
in one of his Cedars. “We even named him Mickey,” he says. “Then I
asked Josette to prepare a parachute so that we may bring the nose
cone and Mickey safely back to Earth. But being an animal lover,
Josette used all her persuasive talents to stop us from launching
him.” Mickey, Manougian says, remained safe in the Lebanese Rocket
Society lab. “And it was a good thing I listened to her,” he says,
“because the parachute didn’t deploy.”
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, something Manougian describes as
“perhaps the most telling of expressions of pride in the project”. 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. The student lost an eye, received thirddegree
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.
Manougian says that during the years that the rocket society was
active, a sign on his office wall read: “Chemicals may be used to
poison people, or they may be used to cure the sick; atomic power
may be used to annihilate nations, or it may be used to generate
electricity; rockets may be used to cause death and destruction,
or they may be used to explore the universe”. That said, for the
last couple of years he had noticed that his work was being closely
monitored by “people from the Soviet Union, the CIA and Mossad.
“They called themselves cultural attaches,” he says. “I met with the
head of the CIA several times and made it clear to him what I was
doing so he understood there was no military operation going on. He’d
ask me questions about the propellent.” Manougian says his work was
an open book. “There were no secrets and I was eager to demonstrate
the peaceful and scientific nature in the uses of rocketry.” One time
he deliberately placed a paperweight on top of some papers on his desk
and when he returned they had been messed up. “Next time I left a note
on my desk in large letters saying my filing cabinet was open and my
papers were available to look at, but please do not mess up my desk.”
Years later, he says Wehbe confessed that the Lebanese military was
never interested in seeing fireworks. “He was very frank,” Manougian
says. “He said their interest was to see whether they could convert
it into something the military could use and he apologised for not
telling me that when we were working together.
“From 1964 until 1966 we were launching fairly sophisticated rockets –
far superior to the ones Hizbollah uses now. What they use are so
primitive. They have no directional capability. And ours reached
further than theirs can.”
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 DayWar, 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 film-maker Khalil Joreige stumbled
uponManougian’s story in 2000. “Today, we’re much more aware of what
can happen militarily,” Hadjithomas tells me from her home in Paris.
“But in the Sixties,Manoug and his students couldn’t see that, little
by little, the army was taking advantage. When we were making the
film we had a lot of discussions about that. He was really upset by
it. It was a betrayal in a way.”
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 film-makers 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
rocketmounted 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 Lebanese Rocket Society’ is released on October 18
Manougian wanted to send a mouse upin one of the rockets. But he was
stopped by his animallovingwife
‘Manoug and his students couldn’t see that the army was taking
advantage. It was a betrayal in a way’