Qian Xuesen

Qian Xuesen

1910–2009

Qian Xuesen, who has died at 98, was a pioneering Cold War rocket scientist who worked for both the West and the East. After helping establish Cal Tech’s legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he returned to his native China and became known as the father of its missile and space programs.

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Born in Hangzhou, Qian was educated at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and then at MIT and Cal Tech, where he earned his doctorate, said the Los Angeles Times. After World War II, he interrogated Nazi scientists, including rocket wizard Werner von Braun. At Cal Tech, he was “a member of the university’s so-called Suicide Squad of rocket experimenters who laid the groundwork” for the testing done by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But his career “came to a screeching halt in 1950” when the FBI accused him of communist leanings and arrested him for allegedly stealing classified materials. Qian denied any wrongdoing, but in 1955 he “was shipped off in an apparent exchange for 11 American airmen captured during the Korean War.” Qian’s expulsion, said then­–Navy Secretary Dan Kimball, “was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a communist than I was.”

“The U.S.’s loss was China’s gain,” said the London Guardian. Qian became director of his nation’s rocket research and helped achieve breakthroughs in ICBMs, Silkworm anti-ship missiles, reconnaissance satellites, and ultimately the technology that sent China’s first astronaut into space, in 2003. “As a result both of his work and of support from the Soviet Union, China was able to test its own atomic bomb in 1963–64. A mere 15 years after its founding, it had joined the elite nuclear club.”