Tsien Hsue-shen

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Tsien Hsue-shen

Born December 11, 1911 (1911-12-11) (age 96)
Hangzhou, China
Occupation Co-founder, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

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. NASA documents commonly refer to him as H.S. Tsien.[1]

During the 1940s Tsien was one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory[2] at the California Institute of Technology. During the red scare of the 1950s the United States government accused Tsien of having communist sympathies. When he eventually returned to China he led the Chinese rocket program, and became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" (or "King of Rocketry").

Asteroid 3763 Qianxuesen was named after him.

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[edit] Early life and education

Tsien Hsue-shen 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 National Chiao Tung University (currently Jiao Tong University) in 1934 and in August of 1935 Tsien Hsue-shen left China on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity 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, including Jack Parsons. 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.

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

After World War II he served under von Kármán as a consultant to the United States Army Air Force, and was eventually given the "assimilated rank of colonel". Von Kármán and Tsien were sent by the Army to Germany to investigate the progress of wartime aerodynamics research. Tsien investigated research facilities and interviewed such German scientists as Wernher von Braun and Rudolph Hermann.[3] Von Kármán wrote of Tsien, “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.”[2]

During this time, Colonel Tsien worked on a designing an intercontinental space plane [Tsien Space Plane 1949]. His work would inspire the X-20 Dyna-Soar which would later be the inspiration for the Space Shuttle.

Jiang Ying in 1947
Jiang Ying in 1947

In 1945 Tsien Hsue-shen married Jiang Ying (蒋英), a famed opera singer and the daughter of Jiang Baili (蒋百里) - one of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek's leading military strategists, and his Japanese wife.

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. Later, the U.S. sought to deport him while Tsien attempted to stay in the U.S. to clear his name. Since he no longer had a security clearance, it was unlikely that he could achieve much for the People's Republic of China by staying in the U.S. Undersecretary of the Navy Dan Kimball tried to keep Tsien in the U.S. commenting "It was the stupidest thing this country ever did...he was no more a Communist than I was and we forced him to go."[4]

Tsien became the subject of five years of secret diplomacy and negotiation between the U.S. 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. Caltech appointed attorney Grant Cooper to defend Tsien. Later, Cooper would say, "That the government permitted this genius, this scientific genius, to be sent to Communist China to pick his brains is one of the tragedies of this century."[5]

[edit] Return to China

In 1955 Tsien was released and deported from the United States together with his wife and their two American-born children 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. Tsien 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 the New China and aimed at fostering high-level personnel of science and technology absolutely necessary for the development of the national economy, national defense construction, and education in science and technology.

In 1979 Tsien was awarded Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award. In the early 1990s the filing cabinets containing Tsien's research work were 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 1980s, Tsien advocated scientific investigation of traditional Chinese medicine, Qigong and "special human body functions". Some people declare that Tsien actually did not spend his effort onto Qigong. 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. This selection is not intended as an honour but is given to the person judged to have the greatest impact on aviation in the past year.[6][2]

In 2008, China Central Television named Tsien as one of the eleven most inspiring people in China.[7]

[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

  1. ^ Biographies of Aerospace Officials and Policymakers. NASA.
  2. ^ a b c Perrett, Bradley (2008-01-06). Qian Xuesen Laid Foundation For Space Rise in China. Aviation Week & Space Technology.
  3. ^ Chang, p109-117.
  4. ^ Perrett, B. (January 7, 2008), Sea Change, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Vol. 168, No. 1, p.57-61.
  5. ^ Naval War College China's Nuclear Force Modernization
  6. ^ Hold Your Fire, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Vol. 168., No. 1, January 7, 2008, p. 8.
  7. ^ Person of the Year, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Vol. 168., No. 12, March 24, 2008, p. 22

[edit] External links