THE LEBANESE ROCKET SOCIETY: TORONTO REVIEW

[Yervant1]

THE LEBANESE ROCKET SOCIETY: TORONTO REVIEW

 

Hollywood Reporter

Sept 30 2012

 

Filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's docu centers on

Lebanon's forgotten space program and the professor in Beirut who

developed rockets with his students.

 

Who knew Lebanon had a space program years before Israel? The Lebanese

Rocket Society tells it like it was, and it's a blast for the viewer

with an interest in strange historical facts about the Middle East. A

funky, easy-access doc with socio-political-asides, it comes from

noted artist-filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (I Want

to See), who seem to really enjoy investigating and divulging this

piece of forgotten history about their country. It's amusing enough

to jet into film clubs after its Toronto launch, though too much a

speciality item to shoot for wide commercial release.

 

Subtitled The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, this "tribute

to dreamers" is a true story all for more amazing for being unearthed

accidentally. School kids in Lebanon have no inkling that, in the

1960s, a scientist teaching at the Armenian University in Beirut

developed rockets with his students. The young Manoug Manougian,

who now teaches at the University of South Florida, started from the

ground up.

 

Neither the Americans nor the Soviets were about to give away the

formula for rocket fuel, so he and his students prepared hit-or-miss

chemical brews that had some disastrous results. Their successful

launch of toy-size missiles interested the Army, which manufactured

their bigger rockets. On a ridiculously small budget, they had two

important launches in 1962-63 that were "the pride of the nation"

and even commemorated on postage stamps. But by the time of the

Israeli-Arab war in 1967, the Army's involvement raised the suspicion

that a weapons program was underway. Bowing to pressure from its

alarmed neighbors, the Lebanese government quietly put a lid on

everything. The extraordinary thing is that 50 years after the first

launch, almost no one remembers that Lebanon ever had a space program.

 

The final scenes describe the directors' decision to build a monument

in the form of a rocket to place in the courtyard of the Armenian

university. While this coda lacks the compelling feeling of what has

gone before and feels a bit tacked on, it emphasizes their unique

interventionist approach and their desire to be among the researchers,

utopians and dreamers they cite.

 

As in their other documentaries, Hadjithomas and Joreige narrate

the film in their own words, adding a personal touch that helps put

things in context, though it can feel a little too distanced and

intellectual. The Beirut-based filmmakers were born in 1969 after

man walked on the moon, and they draw freely on film archives and

newsreels to set the well-told tale somewhere between Jules Verne

and Georges Melies.

 

Venue: Toronto Film Festival Production companies: Abbout Productions,

Mille et une Productions in association with the Doha Film Institute

Directors: Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige Screenwriters: Joana

Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige Producers: Georges Schoucair, Edouard

Mauriat Directors of photography: Jeanne Lapoirie, Rachel Aoun Editor:

Tina Baz Music: Nadim Mishlawi, Scrambled Eggs, Discipline Animation:

Ghassan Halwani Sales Agent: Urban Distribution Int.

 

No rating, 95 minutes

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/lebanese-rocket-society-toronto-Manoug-Manougian-375228

 

[Groong note: the correct name of the Armenian university in Beirut is

"Haigazian University"]

[Yervant1]

Saudi ARAMCO World

May/June 2013

 

 

Fifty-two years ago, as Soviet cosmonauts and US astronauts were first

venturing into space, another space program was also taking off - in

Lebanon.

 

 

Yes, in the early 1960's, the country of 1.8 million people,

one-quarter the size of Switzerland, was launching research rockets

that reached altitudes high enough to get the attention of the Cold

War superpowers.

 

But the Lebanese program was more about attitude than altitude:

Neither a government nor a military effort, this was a science club

project founded by a first-year college instructor and his

undergraduate students. And while post-Sputnik amateur rocketry was on

the rise, mostly in the us, no amateurs anywhere won more public

acclaim than the ones in Lebanon.

 

 

MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

Manoug Manougian, right, with members of the Haigazian College Rocket

Society, which he founded in 1960. It later became the Lebanese Rocket

Society.

 

But that is forgotten history now, says Manoug Manougian, now 77 and a

mathematics professor at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa.

He leads me into a conference room where he has set out on a table

file boxes filled with half-century-old newspapers, photographs and

16mm film reels.

 

`When I decided to leave, no one was interested to take care of all

this,' says Manougian. `But I felt, even at that point, that it was a

part of Lebanese history.'

 

 

TOP: MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

Above: Manougian now teaches at the University of Southern Florida,

where he keeps newspaper front pages on his office wall. `It was a

part of Lebanese history,' he says. Top: The Society launched its

first `tiny baby rockets' at the mountain farm of one of its members.

Born in the Old City of Jerusalem, Manougian won a scholarship to the

University of Texas, and he graduated in 1960 with a major in math.

Right away, Haigazian College in Beirut was glad to offer him a job

teaching both math and physics. The college also made him the faculty

advisor for the science club, which Manougian reoriented by putting up

a recruitment sign that asked, `Do you want to be part of the

Haigazian College Rocket Society?'

 

He did this, he explains, because even as a boy, he loved the idea of

rockets. He recalls taking penknife in hand and carving into his desk

images of rocket ships flying to the moon. `It's the kind of thing

that stays with you,' Manougian says.

 

John Markarian, former head of the college, now 95, recalls thinking

it was `a rather harmless student activity. What a wonderful thing it

was.' The first rocket, he says, `was the size of a pencil.'

 

Six students signed up, and in November 1960, the Haigazian College

Rocket Society (hcrs) was born. `It is not a matter of just putting

propellant in the tube and lighting it,' says Manougian. Former hcrs

member Garo Basmadjian explains that at the time, `we didn't have much

knowledge, so we looked at ways to increase the thrust of the rocket

by using certain chemicals.' After dismissing gunpowder, they settled

on sulfur and zinc powders. Then they would pile into Manougian's

aging Oldsmobile and head to the family farm of fellow student Hrair

Kelechian, in the mountains, where they would try to get their

aluminum tubes to do, well, anything.

 

`We had a lot of failures, really,' says Basmadjian.

 

 

MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

1963 saw the launch of Cedar 3, a three-stage rocket that allegedly

broadcast "Long Live Lebanon" from its nose cone as it rose. Left: The

Cedar launches were commemorated on this postage stamp issued on

Lebanon's independence day.

 

MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

But soon enough `it did fly some distance,' Manougian adds.

 

The hcrs began using a pine-forested mountain northeast of Beirut to

shoot off the `tiny baby rockets,' as Manougian calls them, each no

longer than half a meter (19").

 

As they experimented, the rockets grew larger. By April 1961, two

months after the first manned Soviet orbital mission, the college's

entire student body of 200 drove up for the launch of a rocket that

was more than a meter long (40").

 

The launch tube aimed the rocket across an unpopulated valley, but at

ignition, Manougian recalls, the thrust pushed the `very primitive'

launcher backward, in the opposite direction, and instead of arcing up

across the valley, the rocket blazed up the mountain behind the

students.

 

 

MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

Launches at the military site of Dbayea, overlooking the Mediterranean

north of Beirut, drew crowds of spectators, journalists and

photographers.

`We had no idea what lay in that direction,' says Manougian. To

investigate, the students started climbing, and on arrival at the

Greek Orthodox church on the peak, they came on puzzled priests

staring at the remains of the rocket, which had impacted the earth

just short of the church's great oaken doors. Manougian calculated

that, even with the unplanned launch angle, considering thrust and

landing point, the rocket had reached an altitude of about a kilometer

(3300'), and he adds the bold claim that this was the first modern

rocket launched in the Middle East.

 

 

MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

Ballistics expert Lt. Youssef Wehbe (in uniform) began supporting the

rocket society in 1961, initially by allowing it access to an

artillery range on Mount Sannine.

The next day, Manougian got a call from Lieutenant Youssef Wehbe of

the Lebanese military. He cautioned that the hcrs couldn't just go up

any old mountainside and shoot off rockets. They could, however, do it

as much as they wished under controlled conditions at the military's

artillery range on Mt. Sannine. Wehbe, also in his 20's, was a

ballistics expert, and he was more than intrigued. `Our first

success,' says Manougian, came there at Mt. Sannine, where the rocket

they demonstrated for Wehbe soared 2.3 kilometers (7400') into the

air.

 

Newspapers got wind of the launches, and they reported that the `Cedar

2C' (named for the symbol of Lebanon) had reached 14.5 kilometers

(47,500'). `Obviously, that's not yet the moon distance of 365,000

kilometers. But the Lebanese aren't after that, they're after

technique,' stated the report.

 

Under Wehbe's supervision, hcrs developed two-stage and then

three-stage rockets, each bigger than the last and soaring higher and

farther.

 

In the papers, the rocket men were portrayed as both brawny and

brainy, and they were the talk of Lebanon. A fan club of prominent

Lebanese - mostly women - formed the Comité d'encouragement du Groupe

Haigazian. In the photos and films of the launches, one can see

generals deferring to college kids in hcrs hardhats and eagerly posing

in the press photos with them. Even Lebanese president Fuad Chehab

invited Manougian and his students to the palace for a photo op.

 

`We were just having fun and doing something we all wanted to do,'

says Basmadjian. `When the president came into the picture and gave us

some money, it took off.'

 

 

Three thousand years ago, the Phoenicians, who lived on today's

Lebanese coast but traded as far away as England, were pioneers of

celestial navigation using Polaris, the North Star, recognized by

other cultures as the `Phoenician star.'

 

Today, natives of Lebanon are helping lead the way to the stars.

 

`As a child in Lebanon, I was an avid reader of books about Sinbad,

Ali Baba, Ibn Battuta, Captain Cook, Magellan and Columbus, wondering

how exciting it was for these explorers to anticipate what they were

going to see and discover,' says Charles Elachi, who for 12 years has

directed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. `I

lead a team of 5000 explorers in defining objectives that seem almost

impossible, then going ahead and implementing them. In the last few

decades, we have visited every planet in the solar system and

discovered volcanoes on Io, geysers on Enceladus, lakes on Titan and

river beds on Mars.'

 

At Princeton University, Edgar Choueiri is director and chief

scientist of the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory.

`Plasma rockets differ from chemical rockets, which were the focus of

the Haigazian group and which have been the standard means for

launching and propelling spacecraft into space,' he says. The rockets

Choueiri is developing use magnetic fields and electrically charged

gases (plasmas) to produce thrust, and they are intended for cargo and

manned missions to the moon and Mars. The first toy Choueiri remembers

from his childhood in Lebanon was a water-propelled rocket that he

launched with his father. `It was a poetic moment for me when, decades

later, I found myself working, under nasa funding, on a plasma rocket

concept that uses water as propellant,' he says.

 

George Helou is the director of the Infrared Processing and Analysis

Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), also in

Pasadena, California, and of nasa's Herschel Science Center. He says

it was one of his teachers at the American University of Beirut,

Pierre Monoud, who was also a faculty advisor to the lrs, who

`encouraged me to pursue astrophysics.' Helou has provided research

and management for every major infrared astronomy project launched by

nasa and the European Space Agency. He researches galaxies, and in

particular how they turn gas and dust into stars. `The starry nights

of Lebanon's mountains attracted me to the cosmos,' says Helou.

`Astrophysics has been and still is a wonderful journey.'

 

 

LEFT: JET PROPULSION LABORATORY / CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY;

CENTER: CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; RIGHT: EPPDYL / PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

 

`We were members of a scientific society. We felt good about it,' says

Simon Aprahamian, another former student. `But it didn't feel like

what the us or ussr were doing. It's a small country, Lebanon. People

felt, `This is something happening in our country. Let's get

involved.''

 

Launches now drew hundreds of spectators to the site overlooking the

Mediterranean Sea at Dbayea, north of Beirut, and Haigazian itself

became known as `Rocket College.' As the hcrs was now the country's

pride, its name changed to the Lebanese Rocket Society (lrs).

 

 

ABOVE AND BELOW: MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

Cedar 4 was the society's most powerful rocket. newspapers claimed

that it reached a maximum height between 145 and 200 kilometers

(90-125 mi), though the reality was surely much less. For Manougian,

however, the rockets and their launches were not about setting

records, but about teaching future scientists.

 

Lebanese weren't the only ones watching. Both superpowers, according

to Manougian, had `cultural attachés' observing the launches, and he

believes they did more than that. `My papers were always out of place

on my desk,' he says, and he recalls once leaving a note: `My filing

cabinet I am leaving open. I have nothing to hide. But please don't

mess up my desk!'

 

One night in 1962, Manougian was taken in the back of a limousine to a

factory in the heart of downtown Beirut. There, he was introduced to

Shaykh Sabah bin Salim Al-Sabah of Kuwait, who offered to fund

Manougian's experiments generously if he moved them to Kuwait.

Manougian hesitated, recalling the commitment he made to himself when

he accepted the post at Haigazian: `Don't stay too long. You only have

a bachelor's degree.' More than a private lab, Manougian wanted to get

back to Texas to get his master's.

 

Before Manougian left for Texas, however, he sat down with Wehbe to

plan two launches for Lebanese Independence Day, November 21, in both

1963 and 1964. The rockets would be called Cedar 3 and Cedar 4, and

each would have three stages. They would dwarf what went before in

both size and strength: seven meters (22') long, weighing in at 1270

kilograms (2800 lbs) and capable of rising an estimated 325 kilometers

(200 mi) and covering a range of nearly 1000 kilometers (about 620

mi), the rockets would generate some 23,000 kilograms (50,000 lbs) of

thrust to hit a top speed of 9000 kilometers per hour (5500 mph). From

the nose cone, a recording of the Lebanese national anthem would be

broadcast.

 

 

Today, historians regard it as more likely that the rocket was

accidentally discovered, rather than invented, by the Chinese during

the Sung Dynasty between 960 and 1279 ce. And although historians have

pinpointed reports of `rockets' used in 13th-century battles, Frank H.

Winter, curator emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution's Air and

Space Museum in Washington, D.C., sees them as isolated incidents of

the use of `gunpowder-type weapons' and not necessarily rockets, which

are distinguished, he says, by being self-propelled.

 

 

There is an intriguing manuscript, dating from between 1270 and 1280,

written by a Syrian military engineer named Hasan al-Rammah. His book,

Al-Furusiyya wa al-Manasib al-Harbiyya (The Book of Military

Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices), describes uses for gunpowder

as well as the first process for the purification of potassium

nitrate, a key ingredient. He also includes 107 recipes for gunpowder

and 22 recipes for rockets, which he called al-siham al-khatai

(`Chinese arrows'). Al-Rammah astonishes any contemporary reader by

describing and illustrating one rocket-propelled device that looks

like a scarab beetle. He called it `the egg which moves itself and

burns.' Comprised of two pans fastened together and filled with

`naphtha, metal filings and good mixtures' (likely containing

saltpeter), it had two rudders and was propelled by a large rocket. It

seems to have been designed to ride on the surface of the water as a

kind of torpedo.

 

Ahmad Yousef al-Hassan, the late scholar of Islamic technology,

concluded that this book `cannot be the invention of a single person,'

and thus the `al-Rammah rocket' could possibly be an even earlier

invention.

 

Was it history's first rocket? `This is really hard to pin down

exactly,' says Winter. `Its appearance in the work of al-Rammah shows

that the rocket was known in the Arab world by ... about 1280.' He

adds that al-Rammah `clearly used `Chinese materials,' i.e., terms and

sources.' Thus, at the very least, the knowledge of gunpowder and

rockets in the Eastern Mediterranean would argue for the exchange of

scientific knowledge among the leading civilizations of the time.

 

 

On November 21, 1963, a model of Cedar 3 was paraded through Beirut's

streets to great applause. The cover of the souvenir booklet shows a

rocket overflying the city. For Cedar 4, Lebanon issued commemorative

postage stamps showing the rocket leaving Earth's atmosphere. On

launch day, 15,000 people showed up, along with generals and even the

president.

 

 

MANOUGIAN COLLECTION

In those years, Manougian recalls, the "rocket boys" were celebrities

and Haigazian College was "rocket college." Above, Manougian answers a

journalist's questions after a launch. The last rocket, Cedar 10, flew

in 1967, after Manougian had returned to the us to earn his doctorate.

Then, Cold War politics shut down the program.

The newspapers reported with national pride that the rockets flew into

`space' and landed on the far side of Cyprus. The altitudes that were

published varied from 145 to 200 kilometers (90-125 mi). The actual

figures, however, are likely more modest. `That was totally wishful,'

says Ed Hart, the Haigazian physics professor who took over as faculty

advisor to the lrs. `It never came close. We kept our mouths shut

[because] it was not a student matter anymore. It had become a social,

society kind of matter.'

 

For Manougian, Wehbe told him that according to calculations, the

rockets achieved their aims. Hart, whose specialty is science

education, brings it back to empirical achievement: `We were teaching

students a great deal, and that is what we came for: the mystery and

structure of forces.'

 

In 1964, master's degree in hand, Manougian returned to Lebanon, and

again collaborated with Wehbe on a few more launches. By then, world

powers were interested: France supplied the rocket fuel; the us

invited Wehbe to Cape Canaveral.

 

Cedar 8 was the last lrs rocket. Launched in 1966, it was a two-stage,

5.7-meter (18') rocket with a range of 110 kilometers (68 mi) - a long

way from the pencil-sized rockets of five years earlier. `We were

launching in the evening, and we put lights on top of the second stage

to be able to witness the separation. There were no hitches. It took

off beautifully, the separation was fairly obvious, nothing exploded

and it landed at the time it was supposed to land. To me that was a

perfect launch,' says Manougian, still in awe 50 years on.

 

 

 

Under Manougian's guidance, a new rocket society at usf is exploring

rockets that use plasma engines.

By 1966 Manougian grew concerned about the extent of military

involvement. `I'd accomplished what I'd come there to accomplish. It

was time for me to get my doctoral degree and do what I love most,

which was teaching,' he says. He left in August, and the Lebanese

Rocket Society was no more.

 

But under military auspices, a last Lebanese rocket, Cedar 10, flew in

1967. According to Manougian, Wehbe told him that French president

Charles de Gaulle soon pressured President Chehab to shut down the

rocket project for geopolitical reasons.

 

Decades of political turbulence followed, and the story of the lrs lay

hidden away in Manougian's boxes.

 

Two years ago, science and engineering students at the University of

Southern Florida approached Manougian to set up a rocket society. `My

students did this 50 years ago,' he replied, adding, `What can you do

now that's innovative?' That's how he became faculty advisor of the

Society of Aeronautics and Rocketry (soar), which is exploring rockets

powered by electromagnetism and nano-materials. As in Beirut, he says,

`the important thing is not the rocket. It is the scientific venture.'

 

`Soar' is an apt metaphor for all involved. With the hcrs/lrs rocket

projects, Lebanon punched well above its weight. Wehbe retired as a

brigadier general. Manougian went on to win teaching awards, and he is

loved by his students now as then. Many of the lrs students, and

others inspired by them, went on to excel in scientific pursuits.

 

`Most of us come from very humble beginnings. But we had some brains

and we studied hard,' says Basmadjian.

 

`Did that experience help with regard to making new inventions?' asks

another former student, Hampar Karageozian, who later studied at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded several

ophthalmological drug companies. `Yes, it did. Because it completely

changed my attitude. The attitude that we could say that nothing is

impossible, we really have to think about things, we really have to

try things. And it might work!'

 

 

Sheldon Chad (shelchad@gmail.com) is an award-winning screenwriter and

journalist for print and radio. From his home in Montreal, he travels

widely in the Middle East, West Africa, Russia and East Asia. He will

be reporting from Chad for his next story for Saudi Aramco World.

 

See Photos at http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201303/the.forgotten.apogee.of.lebanese.rocketry.htm

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Yes Yervant

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