Qian Xuesen, or Tsien Hsue-shen (11 December 1911 - 31 October 2009), is a scientist who was a major figure in the missile and space programs of both the United States and People's Republic of China.

Early life and education

Qian Xuesen was born in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, 180 km southwest of Shanghai. He left Hangzhou at the age of three when his father obtained a post in the Ministry of Education in Beijing. He graduated from the Jiao Tong University in 1934 and in August 1935 Qian Xuesen left China on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1936 Qian went to the California Institute of Technology to commence graduate studies on the referral of Theodore von Karman. He obtained his doctorate in 1939 and would remain at Caltech for 20 years, ultimately becoming the Goddard Professor and establishing a reputation as one of the leading rocket scientists in the United States.

It was shortly after arriving at Caltech that Tsien was attracted to the rocketry ideas of Frank Malina and a few other students of von Karman, and their associates, including Jack Parsons. Around Caltech the dangerous and explosive nature of their work earned them the nickname "Suicide Squad."

Career in the United States

In 1943, Qian and two others in the Caltech rocketry group drafted the first document to use the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory; it was a proposal to the Army to develop missiles in response to Germany's V-2 rocket. This led to the Private A, which flew in 1944, and later the Corporal, the WAC Corporal, etc.

During the Second World War, he was amongst many scientists who participated in the "Manhattan Project".

After World War II he served under von Karman as a consultant to the United States Army Air Force, and was eventually given the "assimilated rank of colonel". Von Karman and Qian were sent by the Army to Germany to investigate the progress of wartime aerodynamics research. Qian investigated research facilities and interviewed German scientists such as Wernher von Braun and Rudolph Hermann. Von Karman wrote of Qian, "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."

During this time, Qian worked on a designing an intercontinental space plane. His work would inspire the X-20 Dyna-Soar which would later be the inspiration for the Space Shuttle.

In 1947 Qian Xuesen married Jiang Ying, a famed opera singer.

In 1949, Qian became the first Director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech.

Return to China

In 1955 Qian went to work as head of the Chinese missile program immediately upon his arrival in China. He joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1958.

Qian established the Institute of Mechanics and began to retrain Chinese engineers in the techniques he had learned in the United States and retool the infrastructure of the Chinese program. Within a year Qian submitted a proposal to establish a ballistic missile program. This proposal was accepted and Qian was named the first director of the program in late 1956. By 1958 Qian had finalized the plans of the Dongfeng missile which was first successfully launched in 1964 just prior to China's first successful nuclear weapons test. Qian also contributed a lot to China's Higher Education. He was the first Chairman of the Department of Mechanics of University of Science & Technology of China (USTC), a new type of university established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) after the founding of PRC and aimed at fostering high-level personnel of science and technology necessary for the development of the national economy, national defense construction, and education in science and technology.

In 1979 Qian was awarded Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award. In the early 1990s the filing cabinets containing Qian's research work were offered to him by Caltech. Most of these works became the foundation for the Tsien Library at Xi'an Jiaotong University while the rest went to the Institute of Mechanics. He eventually received his award from Caltech, and with the help of his friend Frank Marble brought it to his home.

He retired in 1991 and has maintained a low public profile in Beijing, China.

China launched its manned space program in 1992 and used Qian's research as the basis for the Long March rocket which successfully launched the Shenzhou V mission in October 2003. The elderly Qian was able to watch China's first manned space mission on television from his hospital bed.

Late life

In his later years, since the 1980s, Qian advocated scientific investigation of traditional Chinese medicine, Qigong and "special human body functions". Some people claim that Qian actually did not spend his effort on Qigong, but that he just expressed that people should consider the widely spread and practiced Qigong in a scientific manner.

In 2008, he was named Aviation Week and Space Technology Person of the Year and China Central Television named him as one of the eleven most inspiring people in China.

Scientific papers

Tsien HS (NASA documents commonly refer to him as H.S. Tsien) Two-dimensional subsonic flow of compressible fluids // Aeronaut. Sci. 1939

Von Karman T, Tsien HS. The buckling of thin cylindrical shells under axial compression. J Aeronaut Sci 1941

Tsien, HS 1943 Symmetrical Joukowsky Airfoils in shear flow. Q. Appl. Math.

Tsien, HS, "On the Design of the Contraction Cone for a Wind Tunnel," J. Aeronaut. Sci., 10, 68-70, 1943

Von Karman, T. and Tsien, HS, "Lifting- line Theory for a Wing in Nonuniform Flow," Quarterly of Applied Mathematics, Vol. 3, 1945

Tsien, HS: Similarity laws of hypersonic flows. J. Math. Phys. 25, 247-251, (1946).

Tsien, HS 1952 The transfer functions of rocket nozzles. J. Am. Rocket Soc

Tsien, HS, "Rockets and Other Thermal Jets Using Nuclear Energy", The Science and Engineering of Nuclear Power, Addison-Wesley Vol.11, 1949

Tsien, HS, "Take-Off from Satellite Orbit," Journal of the American. Rocket Society, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1953

Tsien, HS 1956 The Poincare-Lighthill-Kuo Method, Advances in Appl. Mech.

Tsien, HS, 1958, "The equations of gas dynamics."

Tsien, HS, "Rockets and Other Thermal Jets Using Nuclear Energy", The Science and Engineering of Nuclear Power, Addison-Wesley

Monographs

Engineering Cybernetics, Tsien, H.S. McGraw Hill, 1954

Tsien, H.S. Technische Kybernetik. Ubersetzt von Dr. H. Kaltenecker. Berliner Union Stuttgart 1957

Hydrodynamic manuscript facimile, Jiatong University Press, 2007 ISBN 978-7-313-04199-9

(Source: Wikipedia)