Manougian has lived and worked in the US for a long time now — currently as a mathematics professor at the University of South Florida. Armenian by blood, he was born in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1935, but 10 years later his parents relocated to Jericho in the West Bank to escape the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. It was around this time that he read Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, a gift from his uncle which he refers to as “the genesis of my fascination with science, rockets and space exploration”. As a child with little else to do, Manougian would climb to the top of Mount Quarantania – said to be the Biblical “Mount of Temptation” – and look out over the vastness of the land around him and upwards to the stars wondering why he couldn’t fly to the moon.