Lebanese Rocket Society
(Lebanese Rocket Society)

With the help of their physics professor, a small group of students at the Armenian Haigazian University in Beirut entered the race to conquer space and in 1960 successfully launched the first Lebanese rocket. Several more followed until 1967, the year that the Arab armies were defeated in the war against Israel. Then nothing more. Nothing to the point that even the traces of this adventure seem to have been wiped out and thus forgotten. Why did they stop? And more to the point, why has all this been totally forgotten? What can this Lebanese episode teach us about history itself when, in the Arab world, young people have begun to dream of living a full-blown pan-Arabism in this age of modernity, and even of outstripping it? That everything is possible? JB