Qian Xuesen, the other chief designer. ... everyone who knew anything about it blinked with astonishment and despair
to such an act of blindness, bigotry and idiocy. No espionage plot
never provided much information about rocketry, missile and technology
advanced aerospace a foreign power in one fell swoop. With this monumental
own goal, the United States exported a program
space entire People's Republic of China of Mao. A space program
named Qian Xuesen.
In 1955, the People's Republic of China was a huge country, overpopulated and backward right out of the revolution that founded it and the Korean War. Just beginning to point out something called
China industry, the mere idea that could have an aerospace industry no longer able to send people into space, but to manufacture a single plane, was pure fantasy.
In 1975, twenty years later, the People's Republic of China had already developed an extensive program of
ballistic missiles and space launchers
that allowed him to put his first satellite
in orbit. In 2003 he released his first
taikonaut the cosmos. Currently, they are installing
space stations, sending missions to the Moon
and Mars
and become a commercial operator of first order. The Chinese space program is another
great space program, the other
great hope for our future in the stars .
As always, there were many brilliant people behind these achievements, and as usual, there was at least one that stood out above all others, the brain, the soul of the project, the man whose eyes looked to the stars and hands attached to the land they worked. If the United States it was called Wernher von Braun
and the Soviet Union Sergei Korolev
, People's Republic of China his name was Qian Xuesen. Had you ever heard of him?
The great scholar. Qian Xuesen (钱学森), also transliterated as Tsien Hsue-Shen and otherwise-was born in Hangzhou
being December 1911. A few weeks later to be overthrown for the first time
the last emperor of China
(or penultimate
, as we see it) while the impoverished agricultural country was sliding into the long and complex
Civil War that finally saldaría the Revolution and the triumph of the Communists of Mao
. We can easily make us an idea of \u200b\u200bthe troubled times in which he was the little Qian, son of a state public official.
However, this is not deprived of an education of a certain quality in a time when millions of peasants starved ragged, hardship and privation of every kind. His family moved to Shanghai when he was three years because his father was assigned a position in the Ministry of Education. There studied and graduated as a mechanical engineer end of railroads in the Jiao Tong University
, being 1934, the year he began the Long March
.
Qian's excellent performance in college earned him a scholarship
damages for the Boxer Rebellion , enabling outstanding Chinese students continue their education in the United States. So, after a brief stint in the Air Force China, the young man of twenty-three he left his native country to study in the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There was emphasized again and how. Despite language difficulties, earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering next year at this prestigious institution and capacity building uncommon in theoretical mathematics, he went to
California Institute of Technology (CalTech) to continue his studies under the direction the legendary aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán
.
was at this time that Qian was evidenced as a special genius whom no one wanted to do without. He, meanwhile, became interested in the use of rockets for space flights following the ideas of Frank Malina
. Protected Von Kármán and with other students from CalTech, launched a rocket research group to which everyone called the suicide squad
due to explosive
characteristics of their work. The suicide squad
years later became the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
During World War II students
suicide squad were recruited for the Armed Forces of the United States, where the Chinese engineer reached the rank of colonel. Worked on the development of different artillery rockets and aviation, a team led by Qian was in 1944 the first U.S. multi-stage rocket, called "A Private
. At the end of the conflict, he and Von Kármán was the first to travel to Germany to be defeated with specialists and get their hands on the V-2. These specialists captured was neither more nor less than Wernher von Braun. Nobody could have suspected at the time that the future father of the Chinese space program was questioning and evaluating the future father of the American space program.
After the war, Qian continued serving the United States, aiming higher and higher, farther and farther. Von Kármán wrote about it:
"At age 36, was a genius whose work was indisputable proporcionándnos enormous impetus to advance high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion." In Europe he met a famous opera singer called
Jiang Ying, the daughter of a senior official linked to the national
anticommunist Chiang Kai-shek, whom he married during a visit to China in 1947.
Shortly after his return to the United States to teach at MIT, Qian became the director of the Jet Propulsion Daniel and Florence Guggenheim CalTech and began to work on the design of an aircraft
intercontinental cosmic that later became the
X-20 Dyna-Soar , a direct ancestor of
space shuttle. Father of her first child and another on the way small, applied for U.S. citizenship in 1949. Dr. Qian Xuesen was about to become one of the fathers of American space program, more and more about the regions of the cosmos.
anticommunist hysteria. Then, an FBI report fell on him and his family like a sledgehammer. Qian appeared on a list of members and supporters of the Communist Party
U.S. developed in 1938. Their constant service to America not served at all, or even the fact of being married to the daughter of a national
Chinese. Immediately after the revolutionary victory of Mao and the
witch hunt of McCarthyism
already underway, the engineer was stripped of all its ratings on security, which actually prevented him from working in the aerospace sector. Thus unable to support his family, announced his intention to return to Maoist China now (which probably no more than a form of pressure to let him in peace.)
had miscalculated the scope and extent of anti-Communist hysteria United States. This announcement caused the isolated lock him up in Terminal Island prison. Many people tried to intercede for him, but only managed to transfer to a severe under house arrest in miserable conditions. He was accused of espionage for allegedly attempting to remove secret documents
U.S. , such documents were not anything other than log tables. Even the then Secretary of the Navy
said years later:
"It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. Qian was no more communist than I am, and forced him to leave." The case is one of the best engineering experts U.S. aerospace and around the world, with a head full of the most advanced science, was composed in a prisoner exchange program with the newly founded Republic of China. In 1955, Dr. Qian Xuesen, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, father of U.S. multi-stage rocket, the forerunner of the space shuttle, the genius
Von Kármán, was deported to China from Mao to change a dozen prisoners of the Korean War. He also marched with his wife and two children born in the United States. And a huge amount of knowledge that was in his mind privileged.
All who knew something about the subject blinked with astonishment and despair at such an act of blindness, bigotry and idiocy. No espionage plot never provided much information about rocketry, missile and advanced aerospace technology to a foreign power in one fell swoop. With this monumental own goal
, the United States exported a space program entirely to the People's Republic of China of Mao. A space program named Qian Xuesen. Here, anti no one can beat us. Do not mention it!
The east wind . course, the authorities lacked Maoists time to put to work providing it with all possible means as Qian stepped on Chinese territory. As in China or anywhere else in the world outside the United States and the Soviet Union had sufficient institutions for the newcomer could expatiate at will, allowed him to immediately establish the Institute of Mechanics of the Academy
Sinica and head of the program made ballistic missile development. Quickly, the genie turned up and down the weak Chinese program of rockets and missiles and was selected students a course that soon traveled to the USSR, with whom they were on good terms by then- to complete their training with the Soviet space engineers were preparing to launch Sputnik
.
apparently in a last act of loyalty to his former colleagues, Qian deliberately left in the United States its written record and did not provide details about the programs Americans to the USSR. Instead, it was rebuilt from scratch in China. On the basis of a short-range missile R-2 Soviet
-an enhanced copy of the German V-2, unlike the following designs Russians, who were deported completely native-our co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got space program and launched a missile at high scale during the next three decades.
In 1958, Qian had already completed the basic conceptual design of the ballistic missile series Dong Feng, which means
east wind. It was also around this time when he joined the Communist Party of China
seems to finally become the red
had never been before. The first release of DF-1-local version of the R-2-were initiated in 1960, followed quickly by the DF-2 1,000-km range in 1962-which many believe originated in the Soviet R-3 and DF- 3 in 1966, capable of carrying a nuclear payload to the Philippines. Immediately after the DF-4 would multistage, in 1970, followed by the DF-5 in 1971.
The DF-5 was already an intercontinental ballistic missile design all its own, with more than 12,000 km range and therefore able to reach the entire world except South America. That included the USSR (which now no longer got along so well), Europe y. .. United States, of course. In the sixteen years since his removal, Dr. Qian had brought to China from the oxcart to become
the other nuclear power with global reach. And it stopped working.
The long traveler. At that point, the Chinese space program had already achieved a huge entity and was ready to take the next step. Early in the evening of April 24, 1970, from a place called
inhospitable Gobi Jiuquan, a Long March rocket called a
broke ground with no intention of falling on anyone. His fate was up there in the stars.
few minutes later, a strange melody began to bathe the world from the heavens. It was a revolutionary song china,
the East is Red (Dong Fang Hong), and kept ringing for the next twenty-six days. That is, during the twenty-six days that the Chinese first artificial satellite remained in orbit. Dr. Qian Xuesen had to turn to China, too, in a space power, while others are venturing into his disciples the task of developing naval missile known as the Silkworm
and his successors.
During the following years, China continued to release and learning. For the Long March 1 were followed by 2, 3 and 4 which have become the backbone of your program. They are pitching a broad array of light, medium and heavy do not have much to envy the United States, Russia or Europe. Following the model of the Soviet space program, developed
Yuanwang ships and prepared to enter the big league following a logic very similar to those of the series Vostok, Soyuz, Salyut and Mir using proprietary technology.
Finally, Qian retired in 1991, eighty years after it adopted a low profile and became interested in the scientific study of traditional Chinese medicine. All around, the mighty work that was started their journey, taking the first taikonaut into space in 2003, preparing to launch its first space station, entering in the commercial segment, preparing to go to the moon and Mars and beyond, increasingly becoming one of the major players for the future of humanity. All this and more had their eyes met before who perished in Beijing, at 97 years of age, October 31, 2009.
This was Qian Xuesen, the Rockets
Emperor, the wise man, serene, gentle and dreamy, which launched two
space programs of immense value. Considered by all the patriarch of the taikonaut
china,
his work extend for decades and centuries into the future as old bones lie in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery (which is still the Arlington Novodevichy Americans or the Russians, Chinese version). From the five cosmodromes Chinese spacecraft are taking off he conceived normally. In secret locations throughout the Republic, the atomic missile designed to protect them from any aggression, and those who are not atomic represent an excellent export item. As someone else said about the space program
,
this is no longer an adventure, is now a work. That is probably the best thing you can say something.
Qian Xuesen
(1911-2009), a mechanical engineer, member of the China Academy of Sciences.
Colonel of the Armed Forces of the United States, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, forerunner of the space shuttle.
Founder of China's space program, Hero of Science, Medal of Merit.
spacecraft designer.