[IP] U.S. drove out founder of China's rocketry program
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 13:51:06 -0300
From: Claudio Gutierrez <cgutierrez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: U.S. drove out founder of China's rocketry program
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
BEIJING (AP) -- The founder of China's rocketry program that on Wednesday
launched its first astronaut into space began his career building ballistic
missiles for the U.S. government during World War II.
Tsien Hsue-shen, 92, was a U.S. Army officer, a co-founder of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Colleagues called him one of the brightest minds in the new
field of aeronautics.
Then, in 1955, Tsien was driven out of the United States at the height of
anticommunist fervor.
Born in 1911 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Tsien left for the
United States after winning a scholarship to graduate school in 1936. He
earned a doctorate and became a professor at the California Institute of
Technology, later moving to MIT.
During World War II, Tsien helped to design ballistic missiles for the U.S.
military. In 1945, as an Army colonel with a security clearance, he was
sent to Europe on a mission to examine captured rocket technology from Nazi
Germany.
Tsien studied the German V-2 rocket and interviewed its chief designer,
Wernher von Braun, who would go on to play a key role in the American
manned space program.
After the war, Tsien married the daughter of a military adviser to Chinese
leader Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, Tsien applied to become a U.S.
citizen, shortly before Chiang's Nationalist forces were defeated by Mao
Zedong's communists.
As anticommunist unease in the United States mounted, the FBI confronted
Tsien in 1950 with a U.S. Communist Party document from 1938 that listed
him as a member. Tsien denied being a communist, but he was briefly
arrested and lost his security clearance. Washington began hearings to
deport him, though he was never charged with a crime. After five years of
virtual house arrest and secret negotiations between Washington and
Beijing, Tsien left for his homeland in 1955.
Four months later, Tsien presented then-Premier Zhou Enlai with a proposal
to set up an "aerospace industry for national defense," according to the
Chinese Communist Party newspaper People's Daily. He joined the party in 1958.
Tsien, whose name also is written Qian Xuesen or Tsien Hsue-sen, led
development of China's first nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and worked on
its first satellite, launched in 1970.
He retired in 1991, the year before China's latest manned space program was
launched. But his research formed the basis for the Long March CZ-2F rocket
that carried astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit.
Today Tsien is an enigma -- showered with official honors by Beijing, which
named him "king of rockets," but rarely seen in public.
In her 1996 biography of Tsien, "The Thread of the Silkworm," American
author Iris Chang says he tried to erase his past, destroying documents and
asking friends not to talk about him.
In an unusual burst of publicity, Tsien was publicly honored on his 90th
birthday in 2001. Then-President Jiang Zemin visited him at home, where
state media said the ailing Tsien was confined to bed. People's Daily ran a
large photo of the meeting on its front page.
"He's the father of our space industry," Luan Enjie, director of the China
National Space Administration, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2001. "It's
difficult to say where we would be without him."
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Space/2003/10/15/226775-ap.html
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/