An Opinion:

When the Space Race Reached Beirut

The excitement of the space race was not confined to Cape Canaveral, Houston, or the laboratories of America's aerospace industry. Its influence reached classrooms around the world, including a small Armenian college in Beirut, Lebanon.

In November 1960, inspired by the growing competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, a young mathematics and physics instructor named Manoug Manougian organized the Haigazian College Rocket Society. Rather than teaching rocketry exclusively through equations and textbooks, he challenged his students to build and launch rockets themselves.

Six undergraduate students initially joined him. Working with limited funds and improvised equipment, they experimented with solid-fuel propulsion, learned the mathematics of flight, and gradually developed increasingly sophisticated rockets. Their early failures were part of the education. Their eventual successes were extraordinary.

By 1961, they had successfully launched rockets reaching altitudes of one and two kilometers. In subsequent years, their Cedar series progressed to multistage rockets. The project attracted the attention of the Lebanese military and government, and images of the Cedar rockets even appeared on Lebanese postage stamps.

What makes this story remarkable is not simply the rockets themselves. It is what happened in that classroom. A teacher took an international scientific competition and transformed it into a hands-on engineering education. Students who might otherwise have studied physics and mathematics as abstract academic subjects became experimenters, designers, and builders.

They were learning the same fundamental principles that engineers in the American and Soviet space programs were applying on a vastly larger scale.

The Haigazian project eventually came to an end following an accident and changing circumstances in Lebanon, but its legacy deserves recognition. It demonstrated that the spirit of exploration was not the exclusive property of superpowers with enormous budgets. Curiosity, imagination, a gifted teacher, and a handful of determined students could also reach for the sky.

In a sense, the Cedar rockets represent another kind of giant leap: not a leap from Earth to the Moon, but a leap from the classroom to the world of practical science and engineering.

For further reading: Smithsonian Magazine — The Bizarre Tale of the Middle East's First Space Program and Haigazian University — HU Produced the First Rockets Shot in the Arab World