Qian Xuesen, Wade-Giles romanization Ch’ien Hsüeh-sen, additionally spelled Tsien Hsue-shen, (born December 11, 1911, Shanghai, China—died October 31, 2009, Beijing), Chinese engineer and analysis scientist widely known because the “father of Chinese aerospace” for his function in establishing China’s ballistic missile program.
Qian was the one youngster of an aristocratic Hangzhou household whose recorded lineage of greater than a thousand years has been traced to Qian Liu (852–932), the founding father of the Wu-Yue kingdom. His grandparents had been rich retailers. His father, Qian Jiachi, was an academic reformer and administrator, and his mom, Zhang Lanjuan, studied the Confucian classics. Qian’s household historical past engendered highly effective emotional connections to a reworking Chinese tradition that may outline Qian’s skilled life and make him an icon of Twentieth-century China.
Qian positioned third in mechanical engineering within the nationwide faculty entrance examination and received a coveted slot finding out railroad engineering at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, however because the promising younger scientist was creating, his homeland collapsed. Failed governments had left China impoverished and weak; Shanghai was bombed and invaded by Japan in 1932. Qian graduated from Jiaotong in 1934, and the next 12 months he left China for graduate examine in aeronautical engineering on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship from the U.S. authorities.
The focus of the MIT program on sensible purposes was ill-suited to Qian, and in 1936 he left for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to review below analysis engineer Theodore von Kármán. In an age earlier than computer systems, Qian’s means to shortly carry out advanced calculations flawlessly was a useful asset to von Kármán and a nascent group of rocket scientists at Caltech, the place Qian grew to become a acknowledged skilled within the examine of aerodynamics and jet propulsion. He acquired his doctorate in aeronautics from Caltech in 1939.
In 1943, throughout World War II, Qian helped put together an evaluation of the German rocket program for the U.S. Army, and on the warfare’s finish he traveled to Germany as a U.S. Army colonel to debrief captured German rocket scientists, together with Wernher von Braun. He helped create and arrange the U.S. long-range rocket analysis program and directed analysis on the nation’s first profitable solid-fueled missile, the Private A. In 1947 Qian left Caltech with von Kármán for MIT. He then surrendered his tenured professorship in aeronautics to comply with von Kármán again to Caltech in 1949, and that very same 12 months he succeeded von Kármán because the Robert H. Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion and because the director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center.
Qian’s issue adjusting to American tradition and his sturdy private attachment to China engendered suspicions throughout the McCarthy period that abruptly ended his profession. In 1950 he was detained on costs of espionage. (It continues to be undetermined if there was any foundation to those costs.) After 5 years below home arrest, Qian was allowed to return to China along with his spouse, Jiang Ying, and his two American-born youngsters, son Yonggang and daughter Yongzhen. He acquired a hero’s welcome from the Chinese authorities, which had negotiated with the Eisenhower administration for his launch in change for Americans imprisoned in China.
Qian’s management function within the founding of the U.S. rocket program led to his appointment in 1956 because the director, and later deputy director, of the Fifth Academy of the Chinese Ministry of Defense (later reorganized because the Chinese Academy of Space Technology [CAST] with Qian as director in 1968). Qian was circuitously chargeable for the event of any particular missile, rocket engine, or satellite tv for pc. He earned the imprimatur “the father of Chinese aerospace” as a result of he personally educated the primary era of revolutionary China’s aerospace engineers. Qian’s loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and his dedication to the revitalization of his homeland cemented his legacy as a scientific chief. His unquestioned political integrity and patriotic zeal had been indispensable in serving to the aerospace program purchase essential institutional and monetary assist all through the turbulent political struggles of the Maoist period.
Qian was a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He held a number of overlapping management positions through the years, together with the director of the Institute of Mechanics on the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the director of the Chinese Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and the vice-minister of the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building.
Qian’s profession as a scientist was lower quick by his administrative duties in addition to by China’s worldwide isolation and technological immaturity. After his retirement in 1970, Qian turned to music, the martial arts, and conventional Chinese philosophy for mental stimulation. He spent the final 20 years of his life in relative isolation, often showing in public to attend occasions or make pronouncements in assist of presidency insurance policies.