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Leading Chinese rocket designer. Raised in Hang-zhou, a provincial capital in
east China, Tsien was a precocious student who won a scholarship to study engineering
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then, in 1939, received a Ph.D.
in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. At Caltech, Tsien
was a protégé of Theodore von Kármán and a
member of a group of students, known as the "Suicide Squad", who rocketry experiments
were considered so hazardous they were banished to desert arroyos. Commissioned
as a colonel in the United States Army Air Force and granted security clearance
despite his Chinese citizenship, Tsien was one of the founders of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory. After World War II, he applied knowledge gained from
the V-2 missile program to the design of an intercontinental
space plane. Tsien’s work on this concept inspired the design of the Dyna-Soar
and, ultimately, that of the Space Shuttle.
In 1950, at the start of the McCarthy era, Tsien was falsely accused of communist
activities and for the next five years subjected to harassment and virtual house
arrest before being deported to the People’s Republic of China. Subsequently,
he became the father of Chinese ICBM technology and of the Long
March launch vehicle. He watched the launched of the first manned Chinese
mission in 2003 from his hospital bed.
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