Tsien Hsue-shen
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Tsien Hsue-shen (Simplified Chinese: 钱学森; Traditional Chinese: 錢學森; pinyin: Qián Xuésēn; born December 11, 1911) 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 (PRC).
Tsien was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and became the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" (or "King of Rocketry") when he returned to China after being accused of being a communist by the United States government during the red scare of the 1950s the same way Wu Ningkun was accused of being an American spy in mainland China.
Asteroid 3763 Qianxuesen was named after him.
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[edit] Early life and education
Tsien Hsue-shen was born in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. He left Hangzhou at the age of three when his father obtained a post in the Ministry of Education. He graduated from Chiao Tung University (currently Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in 1934 and in August of 1935 Tsien Hsue-shen left China on a Boxer Rebellion Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1936 Tsien Hsue-shen went to the California Institute of Technology to commence graduate studies on the referral of Theodore von Kármán. Tsien 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 Kármán, and their associates. Around Caltech the dangerous and explosive nature of their work earned them the nickname "Suicide Squad."
[edit] Career in the United States
In 1943, Tsien 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.
After World War II he served in the United States Army as a Lieutenant Colonel. Tsien was sent by the Army to Germany and was part of the team that examined captured German V-2 rockets.
In 1945 Tsien Hsue-shen married Jiang Ying (蒋英), the daughter of Jiang Baili (蒋百里) - one of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek's leading military strategists.
Soon after Tsien applied for U.S. citizenship in 1950, allegations were made that he was a communist and his security clearance was revoked. The Federal Bureau of Investigation located a 1938 US Communist Party document with his name on it. Tsien found himself unable to pursue his career and within two weeks announced plans to return to mainland China. After his announcement the U.S. government wavered between deporting him and refusing to allow his departure due to his knowledge. Tsien became the subject of five years of secret diplomacy and negotiation between the United States and PRC. During this time he lived under virtual house arrest. Tsien found himself in conflict with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, including an arrest for carrying secret documents which ultimately turned out to be simple logarithmic tables. During his incarceration Tsien received support from his colleagues at Caltech including Caltech President Lee DuBridge, who flew to Washington to argue Tsien's case.
[edit] Return to China
In 1955 Tsien was released and deported from the United States as a part of post-Korean war negotiations to free American prisoners of war held by China. He went to work as head of the Chinese missile program immediately upon his arrival in China. Tsien deliberately left his research papers behind when he left the United States. Tsien joined the Communist Party of China in 1958.
Tsien 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 Tsien submitted a proposal to the PRC government to establish a ballistic missile program. This proposal was accepted and Tsien was named the first director of the program in late 1956. By 1958 Tsien 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. Tsien's program was also responsible for the development of the widespread Silkworm missile.
In 1979 Tsien was awarded Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award. In the early 1990s the filing cabinets containing Tsien's research work was offered to him by Caltech. At first Tsien refused but was finally convinced by his former colleagues to accept the work. 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. Tsien eventually received his award from Caltech, and with the help of his friend Frank Marble brought it to his home in a widely-covered ceremony.
Tsien retired in 1991 and has maintained a low public profile in Beijing, China.
The PRC government launched its manned space program in 1992 and used Tsien's research as the basis for the Long March rocket which successfully launched the Shenzhou V mission in October of 2003. The elderly Tsien was able to watch China's first manned space mission on television from his hospital bed.
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel 2010: Odyssey Two, named a Chinese spaceship after him.
[edit] Late life
In his late years, since the 1980's, Tsien devoted himself to spirituality research, and tried to find scientific explanations for Qigong and other "special functions of human (人体特异功能)", e.g. to know what is written on a piece of paper inserted into one's ear, a special function claimed by some people, who most likely were simply playing a magician's trick.
[edit] Scientific papers
- Tsien HS 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 Poincaré-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
[edit] Monographs
- Engineering Cybernetics，Tsien, H.S. McGraw Hill， 1954
- Tsien, H.S. Technische Kybernetik. Übersetzt von Dr. H. Kaltenecker.
Berliner Union Stuttgart 1957
- ТЕХНИЧЕСКАЯ КИБЕРНЕТИКА
[edit] References
- Chang, Iris (1995). Thread of the Silkworm. Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-465-08716-7.
- O'Donnell, Franklin (2002). JPL 101. California Institute of Technology. JPL 400-1048.
[edit] External links
- Tsien Revisited
- Caltech oral history interview of Lee Alvin DuBridge, Part II (pp. 31–35)
- China, Encyclopedia Astronautica
