This guy was a genius. If he hadn't been mistreated and wrongfully imprisoned by the Americans, even after having served in the US Army, he probably would not have returned to China to work on their missile and space programs. Such is the price of paranoia. This was a loss for the America was China's gain. With his deportation, the US lost a great man; with his death, the world lost a great man. RIP! BEIJING, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- China's keystone space scientist Qian Xuesen, widely known as the country's father of space technology, died here Saturday morning at the age of 98. Qian, born in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, was a major figure in the missile and space programs of China. Qian, a member of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1934. In 1935, he went to study in the aviation department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later studied aviation engineering at the California Institute of Technology. In 1939, he received a doctorate in aviation and mathematics. He returned to China in 1955. More about Dr. Qian Xuesen's life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsien_Hsue-shen
He contributed to the development of American space technology as much as helped China's, but of course, the Americans had to be a complete @$$ in arresting and later deporting him as their sign of gratitude. Don't let your hatred blind you to indisputable facts, especially considering how much the Americans "thieved" off of German scientists in the early days of the Cold War.
He is one of my favorite scientists for his contribution in space science. whenever i walked by the physics hall at caltech, i would stopped and looked at his photo. him and zhao zhongyao are two of the most popular chinese caltechnician that every chinese went there would know. he is, no question, one of the smartest individual and an inspiration for all chinese youth and future space scientists/engineering alike. rest in peace.
Nice thread to commemorate him...I love science and a science graduate! One of his Ideas..... http://www.astronautix.com/craft/tsie1949.htm Class: Manned. Type: Spaceplane. Destination: Suborbital. Nation: China. In 1949 Tsien Hsue-shen, the leading expert in high-speed aerodynamics working in America, applied the knowledge learned from German rocket developments to the design of a practical intercontinental rocket transport. He proposed a 5,000 km single stage winged rocket clearly derived from V-2 aerodynamics. The 22,000 kg rocket would carry ten passengers from New York to Los Angeles in 45 minutes. It would take off vertically, with the rocket burning out after 60 seconds at 14,740 kph at 160 km altitude. After a coast to 500 km, it would re-enter the atmosphere and enter a long glide at 43 km altitude. Landing speed was to be 240 kph. Tsien's fundamental theoretical work on this concept lead to him being called the 'Father of the Dyna-soar' (a 1950's/1960's delta winged spaceplane that was the ancestor of the space shuttle). Crew Size: 10. Typical orbit: Suborbital - 5000 km range. Length: 24.05 m (78.90 ft). Maximum Diameter: 4.88 m (16.01 ft). Span: 5.76 m (18.89 ft). Mass: 44,000 kg (97,000 lb). Payload: 2,000 kg (4,400 lb). On his accomplishments... http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=space&id=news/aw010708p1.xml Qian Xuesen Laid Foundation For Space Rise in China By Bradley Perrett Nothing in aviation or space in 2007 represented a greater change in the status quo than China’s ascendancy to the first rank of space powers. China had proven its mettle four years earlier by becoming only the third member of the elite club of nations capable of flying humans in space. But in 2007, it accomplished two more feats, proving to the world that it’s a space player to be reckoned with across the board. In January, China destroyed one of its own spacecraft with a ground-launched missile, shattering the aging weather satellite. Then in October, China launched its first planetary mission, sending a scientific probe to the Moon (see p. 59). The man who laid the foundation for these achievements is a brilliant scientist who worked for the U.S. military on advanced rocket projects in the 1940s and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Then, in a remarkably short-sighted move, the U.S. sent this man back to China with all his skills and knowledge of American secrets. With McCarthyism in full bloom, the scientist was deported on dubious charges of being a Communist. That man is Qian Xuesen. And he became the father of the Chinese space program. (The name, sometimes spelled Tsien Hsue-shen, is pronounced chien shu-eh sen.) The antisatellite (Asat) test demonstrated an ability—based on advanced sensors, tracking and precise trajectory control technologies—which had previously belonged only to the U.S. and Russia. The Asat’s warhead, launched by a ballistic missile, intercepted its satellite target nearly head-on, creating an extremely high closing velocity that multiplied the challenges in this test and served to underscore the leap in Chinese technology. The test was condemned worldwide as the largest instance of space pollution in history. Thousands of new pieces of debris, more than 900 of them large enough (10 cm.) to be tracked by ground radars, were suddenly in orbit. They threaten low orbiting satellites of all nations, including the International Space Station. The amount of space junk hurtling around the planet, accumulated in the 50 years since Sputnik, had shot up by 10% in an instant. Worse, because the target satellite, at 860 km. (535 mi.), was fairly high, some fragments will take at least a century to be slowed down and brought back to Earth by the few molecules of atmosphere at that level. China has not explained why, even if it felt it had to conduct the test, it did not use a specially built low-mass target that might have been blasted away at a lower altitude, leaving a smaller debris cloud of shorter duration. Soviet and U.S. Asat tests ended in the 1980s, when far fewer satellites were in low orbit and the dangers of space junk correspondingly lower. While China’s space program began 2007 with a spectacular bang, it ended the year with a more peaceful, but still remarkable, achievement—when the country became the first developing nation to launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit. The Chang’e 1 spacecraft is not in itself the main achievement. The platform is based on a communications satellite that China has been building for years. Rather, China has shown its greatest progress in mastering the challenge of tracking, telemetry and control technology needed to send a probe into deep space. As with the Asat test, the message was that China had joined the front rank of space powers. Qian Xuesen is not our Person of the Year because he personally directed these efforts. Now 96 years old and in poor health, he has not been active in the Chinese space program for many years. Rather, it’s because he, more than anyone, is credited with the leading role in creating the scientific and industrial complex that’s now reaching these heights of achievement. He began to create it, in 1956, from almost nothing. At the time, his Chinese colleagues knew little about rocket propulsion. His personal book collection became a key resource. And his first research institute had only one telephone. “First we recognized that the pressing problem was to teach, not immediately to do independent research,” he later wrote. Fortunately, the Soviets gave crucial help for a few years. The U.S. author Iris Chang, whose 1995 biography Thread of the Silkworm remains a leading source for information about Qian, wrote: “It was he who initiated and oversaw programs to develop some of China’s earliest missiles, the first Chinese satellite, missile tracking and control telemetry systems, and the infamous Silkworm [anti-ship] missile. “And it was he who helped turn systems engineering into a science in China, by working out a management structure that would facilitate communication between tiers of experts with a minimum of confusion and bureaucracy.” Spurred on by Qian, the Chinese moved from copying a Soviet R-2 (SS‑2) missile, itself a development of the German A-4 (V-2) of World War II, to building a succession of progressively larger domestic designs, including the Dongfeng 4 ballistic missile, whose three-stage space launch version, Long March 1, put the first Chinese satellite into orbit in 1970. Chang’e 1 was launched by a Long March 3A rocket, a development of the Dongfeng 5, for which research began as early as 1965. “He’s the father of our space industry,” the head of China’s lunar program, Luan Enjie, once told U.S. journalist Michael Cabbage. “It’s difficult to say where we would be without him.” The story of how China got Qian back from the U.S. has been told many times, not least in the early 1950s, when it was current news. But it’s a fascinating story, and is well worth retelling as we watch China’s latest strides forward. Qian was born in 1911, in the last weeks of Chinese imperial history, and at 23 traveled to the U.S. on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Preferring theory to the practice that MIT then emphasized, he soon moved to Caltech and began to follow a path that would lead to his becoming one of the most eminent rocket scientists in the U.S. While his own country was racked by political division, invasion by Japan and, finally, civil war, Qian became a star pupil of the director of Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, the Hungarian-American engineer and physicist Theodore von Karman. Still in his 20s, Qian became involved in experiments in rocketry, a field that at that time, the late 1930s, was barely taken seriously. But the U.S. Army Air Corps did begin to take it seriously in 1939, tasking Caltech, including Qian, to develop rockets to help bombers take off. As so often with rocket propulsion, the concept of what soon came to be called jet-assisted takeoff, or JATO, looks simple. Getting it to work led the team deeper into the struggle with propellants and combustion stability that helped make “rocket science” a byword for extreme technical challenge. The 1943 discovery of German rocket activity resulted in acceleration in U.S. work and, at Caltech, the creation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with Qian as a section leader directing research for Private A, the first U.S. solid-propellant missile to perform successfully. The force that propelled Qian to the heights of the U.S. military technology establishment was the sudden realization of the potential of jet propulsion, including rockets. Almost ignored in the late 1930s, the technology rose by 1944 to first-rank development importance amid the largest war in history. By early 1945, Qian was in the Pentagon with a high-grade security clearance and writing reports on the latest classified technology nationwide and its implications for future military development. As a member of the U.S. technical mission that scoured Germany for secrets at the end of the war, he interrogated Wernher von Braun. No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space program. Von Karman vouched for Qian to join the Scientific Advisory Board, set up to advise the head of the Air Force. “At the age of 36, he was an undisputed genius whose work was providing an enormous impetus to advances in high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion,” von Karman later wrote, explaining the move. In 1949, Qian described his idea for a spaceplane, a winged rocket that’s credited as an inspiration for the late 1950s Dyna-Soar project, itself an ancestor of the space shuttle. Then his U.S. career suddenly unraveled. In 1950, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) raged against supposed widespread Communist infiltration of the U.S. government and with China now Communist, the authorities revoked Qian’s security clearance. Iris Chang wrote that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had not a scrap of concrete evidence for its charge that Qian was a Communist. But the government did have some evidence, even if it was far from concrete. And the U.S. had clearly found itself in a sticky situation with Qian. When China was a U.S. ally, any feelings of patriotism he might have had could do little harm to the U.S. But now that China was hostile, was it reasonable to let him learn more U.S. secrets? Maybe. He was seeking U.S. citizenship at the time. Apparently insulted, Qian first responded to the loss of his security clearance by trying to return to China, but he was stopped by the government, which wanted to keep his knowledge of U.S. secrets inside the U.S. Then both sides changed their minds. The immigration service sought to deport him, regardless of the fears of other agencies, and Qian tried to stay, apparently determined to clear his name. Qian’s attempt to stay almost certainly proves he wasn’t, in fact, interested in working for China. By that time he could have best done so by going home with his expertise and U.S. secrets. Without a security clearance, it was unlikely he could achieve much for China by staying in the U.S. “It was the stupidest thing this country ever did,” said Undersecretary of the Navy Dan Kimball, who tried to keep Qian in the U.S. “He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go.” The immigration service won its case against Qian, but the government still hesitated to send him back. After years in limbo, the scientist himself decided again to go home and sought help to do so from the Chinese government, which secured U.S. agreement as part of negotiations over Korean War prisoners. China, of course, was delighted to have him back. It welcomed him as a hero when he was finally deported in 1955. His reluctant return was hardly a patriotic act, but that was, and still is, overlooked in the official Chinese view of history. As recently as 2003, the Xinhua news agency, recounting his story, reported blandly: “In 1955, six years after the founding of New China, Qian Xuesen returned to the motherland.” Another fact that’s ignored in China is that he gave bad scientific advice on agricultural yields that may have encouraged Chairman Mao Zedong’s disastrous 1958-61 Great Leap Forward economic policy, which led to perhaps 20 million people dying of starvation. It turned out that some of the U.S. fears of sending Qian back may have been exaggerated. First, the secrets that he knew were at least five years old by the time of his return, and that was an era of rapidly changing technology. Second, no single scientist or engineer can have more than a fraction of the knowledge needed to design space launchers or missiles. So he could only be a leader, not a one-man rocket builder. Indeed, his role turned out to be that of administrator of the Chinese space program. Moreover, Chang wrote that in many cases he told his questioning comrades that the technical answers they needed had already been published; they needed only to look up the right book, often an American one. Finally, while he achieved great things for China as an administrator, those results again probably ended up serving U.S. interests, because China became an adversary of the Soviet Union within about five years of his return. Missiles built by the scientific-industrial complex he created were sent to the west of the country to bring Moscow in range. But if China is now a strategic rival to the U.S., then his achievements are now more important than ever—especially as the Chinese economy moves relentlessly toward front and center on the world stage. Hence the continuing relevance of this very old man.
Good read. the whole spying thing was a mistake. they have no evidence whatsoever other than his association with "chinese".. Honestly, it kinds of sadden most of these accomplished 20th century scientists are slowly passing away.. Nowaday there is no one left from that 20th century club that is actively researching anymore. I hate to say it, but murray gell-mann and chen ningyang might be the next, but i hope their health are good and live as long as nature allows them.
Well, even their own military officials said deporting him was "one of the stupiest things the country has ever done" LOL
A4agent, They didn't want to let him go but at the time China had American POWs. They made a deal for the swap. The funeral for famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen was held at the Baobaoshan Cemetery in Beijing on Friday morning. Qian, dubbed as "China's Father of Rocketry", died in Beijing last Saturday at the age of 98. Qian was one of the chief pioneers of China's space science, and played a leading role in research, manufacturing and testing of China's carrier rockets, guided missiles and satellites. Due to research and development led by Qian, China successfully tested its first atomic weapon in 1964, launched its first satellite in 1970, fired its first inter-continental ballistic missile in 1980, and launched its first manned spacecraft on October 15, 2003. Top party and government leaders including Chinese president Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, attended Friday's farewell ceremony for Qian. Thousands of people from all walks of life, including Qian's close friends and alumnists, were also present to say a tearful goodbye to the scientist. Locals hold a banner to mourn the death of Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen. The funeral for Qian was held Friday morning at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing. Qian Xuesen, dubbed as "China's Father of Rocketry", passed away in Beijing last Saturday at the age of 98. [Photo:cnsphoto] 81-year old Wu Xianlun, an alumnist of Qian Xuesen from Shanghai Jiaotong University, is waiting outside to bid farewell to the famous Chinese scientist. The funeral for Qian was held Friday morning at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing. [Photo:cnsphoto] Locals wait in line. The funeral for Chinese scientist Qian Xuesenwas held on Friday morning at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing. [Photo: sina.com.cn] Locals present a wreath for Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen. The funeral for Qian was held on Friday morning at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing. [Photo: sina.com.cn] People from all walks of life are present to say a goodbye to the scientist Qian Xueshen in Beijing on Friday, November 6, 2009. The funeral for Qian was held on Friday morning at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing. [Photo: cnsphoto] Chinese President Hu Jintao ® shakes hands with a relative of Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen during Qian's farewell ceremony in Beijing on Friday, November 6, 2009. The funeral for Qian was held on Friday morning at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing. [Photo: Xinhuanet] http://english.cri.cn/6909/2009/11/06/45s527402.htm
it's nice to see people showing respect for his contribution to china science program. anyway, this week at caltech, there was a memorial day delicating to his death, that i attended, so that's a nice gesture by the school he studied at.. i thought it's good to mention for his achivement... farewell, rest in peace.
