The Lebanese Rocket Society Page #4

The first photographs

of the baby rockets are his.

He was in Sannine as well.

Harry was there for all the launches:

Cedar 2B, Cedar 2C

Cedar 3 and 4...

The first photos published

by L'Orient and Al Jarida were his.

Images that adorned front-pages

with the success of the project...

still Harry's.

"Harry the Horse"

traveled the world

witnessed revolutions

and wars, met celebrities.

The images of the 60's

and 70's he shows us

are imbued

with the spirit of the era.

They are moving and linked to us.

They resonate within us.

While those of the rockets

have no trace in our imagination.

What is history's memory?

Harry is happy to hear that Manoug

kept traces of his photographs.

Like many photographers

he lost most of his negatives

during the civil wars.

He had not seen the images

of these rockets for ages.

When you read in the eyes

of these youngsters

how happy they are

with their project and its success

you're so proud of them.

You can never forget it.

It's amazing how this project, in

an Armenian university, evolves.

It is endowed with a spaceport

in the heights of Dbayeh.

The army is participating in it

the State, subsidizing it.

Still, it is

at Haigazian University's lab

that students continue mixing fuel

fabricating it from scratch

with their own hands.

It's seems even more

unbelievable today

that Rev. John Markarian, head of

the Protestant university he founded

did not halt the momentum

that went beyond them.

Now 93 years old

John lives in Pittston, Pennsylvania

with Inge, whom he met in Beirut

where he lived for over 25 years.

We didn't go wrong

with the measurements

but with the trajectory.

We took an ordinary map

to study our position

and the rocket's trajectory.

And we noticed

that the South of Cyprus

was on the same level as Syria.

From Dbayeh

if we had launched

the rocket straight

it would have fallen in Cyprus.

So we decided to deviate it slightly.

But the degree of deviation

was obviously not enough.

We received a letter from

our Ambassador in Cyprus, Ghossein

saying that the British Ambassador

had called him

about a rocket launched from

Lebanon which had fallen near a boat.

That could have sparked

a catastrophe.

At that time, in Lebanon

No radar was capable of following

a rocket at that speed and distance.

When I was in England, I trained

on the Decca Navigator System

which used transmissions

from different fixed stations.

The resulting triangulation

of pulse frequencies and phases

enabled us to track

and locate a boat.

So I had the idea

to use the same model

to track the rocket.

And this is what we did.

Some Arab scientists who founded the

Association for Spacecraft Studies

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