Meet Kirkor Divarci, a Turkish-Armenian whose space ambition mirrored Elon Musk's 60 years ago
SpaceX successfully launched astronauts from NASA last week, an event which drew global attention given its timing during the intense and sometimes repetitive news cycle that has been dominated by civil unrest in the US and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Soon after their high school graduation, the club came under the media spotlight as it made its first attempt to launch a rocket. This was October 1959. The machine was 1m tall and weighed 3kg. But after covering a 40m distance, it crashed to the ground. The club members weren't disheartened, however. A few weeks later, they gave it another try, although this failed, too. As a result, the Bandirma Rocket Club was soon greeted with derision, mock and ridicule.
Kirkor's rocket-building project received a financial and technical boost from the Istanbul Technical University and the Turkish Armed Forces, which then paved the way for Kirkor's dream rocket Marmara-1. He launched it on 30 August 1962, Turkey’s victory day. They bounced back with the launch of Marmara-4 which reached a height of more than 5km in the sky. The team earned accolades from Turkey's prominent air commander, Colonel Halim Mentes.
Something unusual then happened to the group. All the support they had received in the past few years began to wane and eventually disappear. Some say they fell victim to the intense political climate of the 1960s, which was marked by a dark military coup, while others accused them of being a tool for American propaganda as they exhibited US-made X-35 jets in their journal.
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