Thread: Qian Xuesen, 2007 Person of the Year for the Aviation Week and Space Technology

Aviation Week : Person of the Year: Qian Xuesen

Tsien_Hsue-shen (Qian Xuesen by mainland Chinese way of spelling)

Tsien Hsue-shen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Qian Xuesen is considered to be one of the Top 10 influential space thinkers by newscientistspace magazine.

Top 10 influential space thinkers - space - 05 September 2007 - New Scientist Space

Quote from the above website:

Tsien Hsue-Shen

1911-

In October 2003, China became the third nation to send a human into orbit. Smiling somewhere at the achievement, no doubt, was Tsien Hsue-shen.

Born in China, Tsien emigrated to the US in the 1930s after winning a scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He later moved to the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where he was considered unusually gifted even among Caltech's stellar student body.

Tsien's star rose quickly: his knowledge of rocketry prompted the US army to make him a colonel and send him to occupied Germany to interview Nazi rocket scientists. Despite this, Tsien became ensnared in Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts and was eventually deported to China, along with his wife and their two American-born children.

Once there, he almost single-handedly created the Chinese space programme: his work led to China's first intercontinental ballistic missile, and eventually to the rocket that sent the first Chinese astronaut into orbit.

Angry and disillusioned by his deportation, Tsien vowed never to set foot in the US again: now in his 90s, he has kept his word. Even so, Tsien has reportedly remained friendly with several of his old Caltech colleagues, who can only wonder what might have been had anti-Communist paranoia not alienated one of America's finest scientific minds. –Greg Klerkx is author of Lost in Space (Secker & Warburg)