cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Space/2003/10/15/226775-ap.html
BEIJING AP - The founder of Chinas rocketry program that on Wednesday launched its first astronaut into space began his career building ballistic missiles for the United States government during World War II. Tsien Hsue-shen, 92, was a United States Army officer, a co-founder of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Colleagues called him one of the brightest minds in the new field of aeronautics. Then, in 1955, Tsien was driven out of the United States at the height of anticommunist fervor. Born in 1911 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Tsien left for the United States after winning a scholarship to graduate school in 1936. He earned a doctorate and became a professor at the California Institute of Technology, later moving to MIT. During World War II, Tsien helped to design ballistic missiles for the United States military. In 1945, as an Army colonel with a security clearance, he was sent to Europe on a mission to examine captured rocket technology from Nazi Germany. Tsien studied the German V-2 rocket and interviewed its chief designer, Wernher von Braun, who would go on to play a key role in the American manned space program. After the war, Tsien married the daughter of a military adviser to Chinese leader Gen. In 1949, Tsien applied to become a United States citizen, shortly before Chiangs Nationalist forces were defeated by Mao Zedongs communists. As anticommunist unease in the United States mounted, the FBI confronted Tsien in 1950 with a United States Communist Party document from 1938 that listed him as a member. Tsien denied being a communist, but he was briefly arrested and lost his security clearance. Washington began hearings to deport him, though he was never charged with a crime. After five years of virtual house arrest and secret negotiations between Washington and Beijing, Tsien left for his homeland in 1955. Four months later, Tsien presented then-Premier Zhou Enlai with a proposal to set up an aerospace industry for national defense, according to the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Peoples Daily. Tsien, whose name also is written Qian Xuesen or Tsien Hsue-sen, led development of Chinas first nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and worked on its first satellite, launched in 1970. He retired in 1991, the year before Chinas latest manned space program was launched. But his research formed the basis for the Long March CZ-2F rocket that carried astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit. Today Tsien is an enigma - showered with official honors by Beijing, which named him king of rockets, but rarely seen in public. In her 1996 biography of Tsien, The Thread of the Silkworm, American author Iris Chang says he tried to erase his past, destroying documents and asking friends not to talk about him. In an unusual burst of publicity, Tsien was publicly honored on his 90th birthday in 2001. Then-President Jiang Zemin visited him at home, where state media said the ailing Tsien was confined to bed. Hes the father of our space industry, Luan Enjie, director of the China National Space Administration, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2001.
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