Sam Brennan
“Back in the 1940s [when I was a child in Jerusalem],
schools were often closed due to regional conflicts,” Manoug Manougian,
former head of the Lebanese Rocket Society (LRS), told Al-Monitor. “To
entertain myself, I read science fiction books.… It was Jules
Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ that was the genesis of my
fascination with space exploration.”
Even in Manougian’s youth,
his passion for space travel and the pursuit of knowledge were closely
tied to the politics of the time. This relationship would see him
create, and then leave, the Lebanese space program in the 1960s. He had
been attracted to the program's potential for groundbreaking
technological feats, but repelled by the government's increasingly
militaristic goals.
Before all that, Manougian had landed a job teaching mathematics and
physics at Beirut’s Haigazian College in 1960, a time when the space
race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing.
It was also a time when some Middle Eastern states, among them Egypt and
Israel, were scrambling to develop militarized rocket technology.
