Taylor Wang

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Taylor Gun-Jin Wang
Taylor Wang
JPL Payload Specialist
Nationality American / Chinese
Born June 16, 1940
Shanghai, China
Other occupation Scientist
Space time 7d 00h 08m
Selection
Missions STS-51-B
Mission
insignia

Taylor Gun-Jin Wang (traditional Chinese: 王贛駿; simplified Chinese: 王赣骏; pinyin: Wáng Gànjùn) (born June 16, 1940) is an American scientist and was the first ethnic Chinese person to go into space. While an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Wang was a payload specialist on the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51-B.

With ancestry in Yancheng, Jiangsu, China, Wang was born in Shanghai to Wang Zhang (王章) and Yu Jiehong (俞潔虹). He moved to Taiwan in 1952 with his family. He studied his later part of elementary school in Kaohsiung, and graduated from the The Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. He later moved to Hong Kong. He started studying physics in UCLA in 1963, and received his M.S. in 1968, and his doctoral in fluid mechanics in 1968 and solid state physics in 1971.

After completing his doctorate, Wang joined the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1972, as a senior scientist. At JPL he was responsible for the inception and development of containerless processing science and technology research. He was the Principal Investigator (PI) on the Spacelab 3 mission NASA Drop Dynamics (DDM) experiments, PI on the NASA SPAR Flight Experiment #77-18 "Dynamics of Liquid Bubble," PI on the NASA SPAR Flight Experiment #76-20 "Containerless Processing Technology," and PI on the Department of Energy Experiment "Spherical Shell Technology."

He gained US citizenship in 1975, and published a paper on dynamic behavior of rotating spheroids in zero gravity the next year. The paper received attention in NASA, and Wang was selected as a payload specialist on June 1, 1983 for the Spacelab-3 mission.

Wang conducted precursor drop dynamics experiments for the DDM in ground-based laboratories employing acoustic levitation systems, neutral buoyancy systems and drop towers, and in the near weightless environment provided by JSC's KC-135 airplane flights and SPAR rockets. These flights have helped to define the experimental parameters and procedures in the DDM experiments performed on Spacelab 3. He is the inventor of the acoustic levitation and manipulation chamber for the DDM and is the author of 70 articles in open literature and 20 U.S. patents.

Wang flew on STS-51B Challenger (April 29-May 6, 1985). STS-51B/Spacelab-3 was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, and returned to land at Edwards Air Force Base, California. It was the first operational Spacelab mission. The seven-man crew aboard Challenger conducted investigations in crystal growth, drop dynamics leading to containerless material processing, atmospheric trace gas spectroscopy, solar and planetary atmospheric simulation, cosmic rays, laboratory animals and human medical monitoring. At mission conclusion, Wang traveled over 2.9 million miles in 110 Earth orbits, and logged over 168 hours in space.

Wang later became a professor at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He has written about 180 articles on drop and bubble dynamics, collision and coalescence of drops, charged drop dynamics, containerless science, and encapsulation of living cells. His experiments were carried out in 1992 in United States Microgravity Laboratory 1 (USML-1), and in 1995 aboard USML-2.

Wang is married to Xueping Feng (馮雪平) with two sons, Kenneth Wang and Eric Wang.


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