Qian Xuesen

Qian Xuesen (born December 11, 1911, Shanghai, China—died October 31, 2009, Beijing) was a Chinese engineer and research scientist widely recognized as the “father of Chinese aerospace” for his role in establishing China’s ballistic missile program.

Qian was the only child of an aristocratic Hangzhou family whose recorded lineage of more than a thousand years has been traced to Qian Liu (852–932), the founder of the Wu-Yue kingdom. His grandparents were wealthy merchants. His father, Qian Jiachi, was an educational reformer and administrator, and his mother, Zhang Lanjuan, studied the Confucian classics. Qian’s family history engendered powerful emotional connections to a transforming Chinese culture that would define Qian’s professional life and make him an icon of 20th-century China.

Qian placed third in mechanical engineering in the national college entrance examination and won a coveted slot studying railroad engineering at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, but as the promising young scientist was developing, 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 following year he left China for graduate study in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship from the U.S. government.

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The focus of the MIT program on practical applications was ill-suited to Qian, and in 1936 he left for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to study under research engineer Theodore von Kármán. In an age before computers, Qian’s ability to quickly perform complex calculations flawlessly was an invaluable asset to von Kármán and a nascent group of rocket scientists at Caltech, where Qian became a recognized expert in the study of aerodynamics and jet propulsion. He received his doctorate in aeronautics from Caltech in 1939.

In 1943, during World War II, Qian helped prepare an analysis of the German rocket program for the U.S. Army, and at the war’s end he traveled to Germany as a U.S. Army colonel to debrief captured German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun. He helped create and organize the U.S. long-range rocket research program and directed research on the country’s first successful 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 follow von Kármán back to Caltech in 1949, and that same year he succeeded von Kármán as the Robert H. Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion and as the director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center.

Qian’s difficulty adjusting to American culture and his strong personal attachment to China engendered suspicions during the McCarthy era that abruptly ended his career. In 1950 he was detained on charges of espionage. (It is still undetermined if there was any basis to these charges.) After five years under house arrest, Qian was allowed to return to China with his wife, Jiang Ying, and his two American-born children, son Yonggang and daughter Yongzhen. He received a hero’s welcome from the Chinese government, which had negotiated with the Eisenhower administration for his release in exchange for Americans imprisoned in China.

Qian’s leadership role in the founding of the U.S. rocket program led to his appointment in 1956 as the director, and later deputy director, of the Fifth Academy of the Chinese Ministry of Defense (later reorganized as the Chinese Academy of Space Technology [CAST] with Qian as director in 1968). Qian was not directly responsible for the development of any specific missile, rocket engine, or satellite. He earned the imprimatur “the father of Chinese aerospace” because he personally trained the first generation of revolutionary China’s aerospace engineers. Qian’s loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and his commitment to the revitalization of his homeland cemented his legacy as a scientific leader. His unquestioned political integrity and patriotic zeal were indispensable in helping the aerospace program acquire critical institutional and financial support throughout the turbulent political struggles of the Maoist era.

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Qian was a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He held several overlapping leadership positions over the years, including the director of the Institute of Mechanics at 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 career as a scientist was cut short by his administrative duties as well as by China’s international isolation and technological immaturity. After his retirement in 1970, Qian turned to music, the martial arts, and traditional Chinese philosophy for intellectual stimulation. He spent the last two decades of his life in relative isolation, occasionally appearing in public to attend events or make pronouncements in support of government policies.