They called it Rocket College

In 1960 a mathematics teacher at a small college in Beirut pinned a notice to a board. Within a few years his students were firing three stage rockets out over the Mediterranean. Then he walked away from it, on purpose.

The notice on the board asked one question. Did you want to be part of the Haigazian College Rocket Society?

It went up in the autumn of 1960, at a small college in Beirut that had been founded on the seventeenth of October 1955 by the Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East and the Armenian Missionary Association of America. The man who pinned it up was twenty five. His name was Manoug Manougian. He was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, he had just graduated in mathematics from the University of Texas, and Haigazian had hired him to teach mathematics and physics and handed him the science club. He turned the science club into a rocket club.

Six students signed up, by the account he gave Saudi Aramco World in 2013. Seven, by the account he gave the BBC the same year. Either way, the society was founded in November 1960, and it had no money at all.

He told the BBC there was no funding and little support, and that he expected to pay for the experiments out of his own salary. The first rockets were cardboard and lengths of pipe. The students tried gunpowder, gave up on it, and settled on a mixture of sulphur and zinc powder. Then they piled into Manougian’s ageing Oldsmobile and drove up to the family farm of one of them, Hrair Kelechian, in the mountains, to see whether the tubes would do anything at all.

For a long while, they mostly did not.

In April 1961 the whole student body of the college, about two hundred people, drove up the mountain to watch a rocket a little over a metre long. At ignition the launcher kicked backwards. Instead of arcing out over the valley, the rocket went the opposite way, up the slope behind them. When the students climbed after it, they found what was left of it just short of the doors of a Greek Orthodox church at the top, with the priests standing over it. Manougian worked out later that it had reached about a kilometre.

The next day the army called. Lieutenant Youssef Wehbe, a ballistics specialist who was also in his twenties, told Manougian that students could not fire rockets off whatever mountainside they liked. They could, however, fire them as often as they wished on a military artillery range. The first rocket they demonstrated for him there climbed a little over two kilometres.

It became a partnership. Under Wehbe’s supervision the students moved on to two stage and then three stage rockets. They named them Cedar, after the tree on the flag. Launches moved to a site at Dbayeh, north of Beirut, looking out over the sea, and began to draw crowds. President Fouad Chehab received Manougian and his students, and the BBC reports that the Ministry of Education provided limited funding for 1962 and 1963. The club became the Lebanese Rocket Society. Around Beirut, Haigazian became known as Rocket College.

Keep the scale in view. Manougian later estimated that the whole programme cost less than three hundred thousand dollars over six years. In the same decade, the Soviet Union and the United States together spent more than thirty billion dollars on space.

Cedar 3 and Cedar 4 were three stage rockets about seven metres long, each weighing well over a tonne. On Independence Day, the twenty first of November 1963, a model of Cedar 3 was paraded through the streets of Beirut. Lebanon issued postage stamps showing Cedar 4. Aramco World reports that fifteen thousand people came out on the day it launched.

There were plans for a passenger. Manougian told the BBC that the team had been training a mouse called Mickey to withstand high acceleration, and that he asked his wife to make a parachute so it could be brought back down. She refused.

There was a price, too. In July 1964, while Manougian was away in the United States working on his master’s degree, a student built a rocket using a propellant he had banned, because the slightest friction could set it off. In the fire that followed, Hampar Karageozian lost an eye and badly burned his hands. A second student ran into the laboratory to pull him out, and was burned as well.

Karageozian went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded several companies developing drugs for the eye. He told Aramco World that the society changed his attitude for good: that nothing is impossible if you think it through and are willing to try.

The last rocket Manougian launched was Cedar 8, in 1966, a two stage rocket five point seven metres long. They fired it in the evening, with lights on the second stage so they could watch it separate. It separated, nothing exploded, and it came down when it was supposed to. He called it a perfect launch.

The army had always been asking a different question from the one he was asking. At every launch, he told the BBC, officers wanted to know how far a rocket would go with a given load in the nose cone, and his answer was always the same: this was not a military operation, it was teaching students science.

Offers came from outside Lebanon as well. He told the BBC that one Arab government offered him a mansion and a laboratory of his own design if he would work for it, and that he turned it down because he was strongly opposed to violence of any kind.

By 1966, Aramco World records, he had grown concerned about how far the military’s involvement had gone. He left in August to take his doctorate, and the Lebanese Rocket Society ended with him. One last rocket, Cedar 10, flew under military control in 1967. After that, nothing.

Accounts of exactly why the programme then stopped for good, and who wanted it stopped, differ from source to source, and most of them rest on what Manougian was told at the time. We are leaving that part where the evidence leaves it.

Search the story and you will find a height. The BBC says Cedar IV, launched in 1963, reached about 145 kilometres. Smithsonian magazine gives the peak to a different rocket, Cedar 8, in August 1966, at close to 87 miles, which is about 140 kilometres. Aramco World, which interviewed several of the people involved, says the newspapers of the time printed altitudes of between 145 and 200 kilometres, and quotes Ed Hart, the Haigazian physics professor who later took over as the society’s adviser, saying those figures were wishful and the rockets never came close. Aramco gives Cedar 8 a range of 110 kilometres. The sources do not even agree on whether Cedar 4 flew in 1963 or in 1964.

So we are printing no altitude, and we are not saying the rockets reached space.

You will also find the word first. Haigazian University calls the Cedars the first rockets in the Middle East. Aramco World presents that as Manougian’s own claim, and Smithsonian qualifies it by noting Egyptian attempts in the late 1950s. We are leaving the word out.

Neither changes anything. A mathematics teacher with no budget, a handful of students, a lieutenant who said yes and a president who found them some money took a rocket from a cardboard tube to a seven metre, three stage machine in about three years. That needs no help at all.

Almost all of it was forgotten. The BBC reports that archive material was lost during the civil war and that many of the students left to work abroad. Paul Haidostian, then president of Haigazian, told Smithsonian in 2016 that during the war nobody wanted to talk about rockets, and that the people who had been involved had gone abroad and stayed there.

What survived, survived mostly because one man kept it. When Aramco World visited him in Tampa in 2013, Manougian laid out boxes of half century old newspapers, photographs and 16mm film on a conference table. Nobody had wanted to look after it when he left, he said, but he felt even then that it was part of Lebanese history.

It came back into view because two Lebanese filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, went looking for it. Their documentary, The Lebanese Rocket Society, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012.

Manougian taught at the University of South Florida for more than forty years and advised its student rocketry society. Youssef Wehbe retired a brigadier general. Manougian died in Tampa on the twenty seventh of March 2024. He was eighty eight.

Not the height of the rocket. The height is disputed, and it can stay disputed.

What is not disputed is this. In a country of 1.8 million people, at a college of two hundred students, a teacher who was not born in Lebanon found that Lebanon was the place where he could do it. An army officer chose to help rather than shut it down. The state put in money. Fifteen thousand people stood on a hillside to watch students launch something they had built by hand. And when the thing they had built became valuable to people who wanted it for something else, the man in charge said no, and went back to teaching.

That is a story about work, about nerve, and about knowing what a thing is for. It is ours, and it very nearly went into a box and stayed there.

He said it himself, to the BBC, half a century later. “Yes, it was a tiny country, but Lebanon could have done it.”

So it goes on the record, with the doubts left in. And so that the next student in Beirut who pins up a notice like that one knows it has been done before, by people who had less.