Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Is Dead at 98

[pampango]

Source: New York Times

BEIJING — Qian Xuesen, a brilliant rocket scientist who single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts after he was drummed out of the United States during the redbaiting of the McCarthy era, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 98 years old.

Mr. Qian served on the United States government’s Science Advisory Board during World War II and, on the war front in Germany, advised the Army on ballistic-missile guidance technology. At the war’s end, holding the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, he debriefed Nazi scientists, including Werner von Braun, and was sent to analyze Hitler’s V-2 rocket facilities. In the 1940s his mentor and colleague, the Caltech physicist Theodore von Karman, called Mr. Qian “an undisputed genius whose work was providing an enormous impetus to advances in high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion.” In 1949, he penned a proposal for a winged space plane that the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, in 2007, called an inspiration for research that led to NASA’s space shuttle.

But by 1950 Mr. Qian’s American career was over. Shortly after applying for permission to visit his parents in the newly Communist China, he was stripped of his security clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and accused of secretly being a Communist. The charge was based on a 1938 United States Communist Party document that showed he had attended a social gathering that the F.B.I. suspected was a meeting of the Pasadena Communist Party.

Mr. Qian denied the charges, his Caltech colleagues rushed to his defense, and the university hired a lawyer to assist him. Mr. Qian first sought to return to China, but was placed under virtual house arrest by the government; later, he sought to stay and fight the accusations, but the government sought to deport him. In 1955, Mr. Qian was sent back to China, where he was proclaimed a hero and immediately put at work developing Chinese rocketry.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/asia/04qian.html

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Interesting that the father of China's space program studied in the US and worked for the government during WWII only to be deported to China during the Red Scare of the 1950's courtesy of Sen. McCarthy. That one sure came back to haunt us. Who knows how far along China's space program and missile technology would be without this guy being told to take his knowledge back to China.

[architect359]

1. From the same article:

'The loyalty allegations have never been fully resolved. Aviation Week, which named Mr. Qian its man of the year in 2007, quoted Dan Kimball, a former under secretary of the Navy, as calling Mr. Qian’s deportation “the stupidest thing this country ever did.”'

'Mr. Qian never returned to the United States, but in a 2002 reminiscence, a Caltech colleague and professor, Frank Marble, stated that he believed Mr. Qian “lost faith in the American government, but I believe he has always had very warm feelings for the American people.”'

Yeah, dumb move.

More importantly, I wonder how much we would have gained with his capabilities on our side. If he (perhaps, one of many others) were thinking of the Space Shuttle decades before it's design, what else could he have helped with in our research and developement environment when it had tons of resources thrown at it ('60's and '70's)?