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Qian Xuesen Laid Foundation For Space Rise in China

Jan 6, 2008

By Bradley Perrett

Nothing in aviation or space in 2007 represented a greater change in the status quo than China’s ascendancy to the first rank of space powers. China had proven its mettle four years earlier by becoming only the third member of the elite club of nations capable of flying humans in space. But in 2007, it accomplished two more feats, proving to the world that it’s a space player to be reckoned with across the board.

In January, China destroyed one of its own spacecraft with a ground-launched missile, shattering the aging weather satellite. Then in October, China launched its first planetary mission, sending a scientific probe to the Moon (see p. 59).

The man who laid the foundation for these achievements is a brilliant scientist who worked for the U.S. military on advanced rocket projects in the 1940s and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Then, in a remarkably short-sighted move, the U.S. sent this man back to China with all his skills and knowledge of American secrets. With McCarthyism in full bloom, the scientist was deported on dubious charges of being a Communist.

That man is Qian Xuesen. And he became the father of the Chinese space program. (The name, sometimes spelled Tsien Hsue-shen, is pronounced chien shu-eh sen.)

The antisatellite (Asat) test demonstrated an ability—based on advanced sensors, tracking and precise trajectory control technologies—which had previously belonged only to the U.S. and Russia.

The Asat’s warhead, launched by a ballistic missile, intercepted its satellite target nearly head-on, creating an extremely high closing velocity that multiplied the challenges in this test and served to underscore the leap in Chinese technology.

The test was condemned worldwide as the largest instance of space pollution in history. Thousands of new pieces of debris, more than 900 of them large enough (10 cm.) to be tracked by ground radars, were suddenly in orbit. They threaten low orbiting satellites of all nations, including the International Space Station. The amount of space junk hurtling around the planet, accumulated in the 50 years since Sputnik, had shot up by 10% in an instant.

Worse, because the target satellite, at 860 km. (535 mi.), was fairly high, some fragments will take at least a century to be slowed down and brought back to Earth by the few molecules of atmosphere at that level.

China has not explained why, even if it felt it had to conduct the test, it did not use a specially built low-mass target that might have been blasted away at a lower altitude, leaving a smaller debris cloud of shorter duration. Soviet and U.S. Asat tests ended in the 1980s, when far fewer satellites were in low orbit and the dangers of space junk correspondingly lower.

While China’s space program began 2007 with a spectacular bang, it ended the year with a more peaceful, but still remarkable, achievement—when the country became the first developing nation to launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.

The Chang’e 1 spacecraft is not in itself the main achievement. The platform is based on a communications satellite that China has been building for years. Rather, China has shown its greatest progress in mastering the challenge of tracking, telemetry and control technology needed to send a probe into deep space.

As with the Asat test, the message was that China had joined the front rank of space powers.

Qian Xuesen is not our Person of the Year because he personally directed these efforts. Now 96 years old and in poor health, he has not been active in the Chinese space program for many years. Rather, it’s because he, more than anyone, is credited with the leading role in creating the scientific and industrial complex that’s now reaching these heights of achievement.

He began to create it, in 1956, from almost nothing.

At the time, his Chinese colleagues knew little about rocket propulsion. His personal book collection became a key resource. And his first research institute had only one telephone.

“First we recognized that the pressing problem was to teach, not immediately to do independent research,” he later wrote. Fortunately, the Soviets gave crucial help for a few years.

The U.S. author Iris Chang, whose 1995 biography Thread of the Silkworm remains a leading source for information about Qian, wrote: “It was he who initiated and oversaw programs to develop some of China’s earliest missiles, the first Chinese satellite, missile tracking and control telemetry systems, and the infamous Silkworm [anti-ship] missile.

“And it was he who helped turn systems engineering into a science in China, by working out a management structure that would facilitate communication between tiers of experts with a minimum of confusion and bureaucracy.”

Spurred on by Qian, the Chinese moved from copying a Soviet R-2 (SS2) missile, itself a development of the German A-4 (V-2) of World War II, to building a succession of progressively larger domestic designs, including the Dongfeng 4 ballistic missile, whose three-stage space launch version, Long March 1, put the first Chinese satellite into orbit in 1970.

Chang’e 1 was launched by a Long March 3A rocket, a development of the Dongfeng 5, for which research began as early as 1965.

“He’s the father of our space industry,” the head of China’s lunar program, Luan Enjie, once told U.S. journalist Michael Cabbage. “It’s difficult to say where we would be without him.”

The story of how China got Qian back from the U.S. has been told many times, not least in the early 1950s, when it was current news. But it’s a fascinating story, and is well worth retelling as we watch China’s latest strides forward.

Qian was born in 1911, in the last weeks of Chinese imperial history, and at 23 traveled to the U.S. on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Preferring theory to the practice that MIT then emphasized, he soon moved to Caltech and began to follow a path that would lead to his becoming one of the most eminent rocket scientists in the U.S.

While his own country was racked by political division, invasion by Japan and, finally, civil war, Qian became a star pupil of the director of Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, the Hungarian-American engineer and physicist Theodore von Karman. Still in his 20s, Qian became involved in experiments in rocketry, a field that at that time, the late 1930s, was barely taken seriously.

But the U.S. Army Air Corps did begin to take it seriously in 1939, tasking Caltech, including Qian, to develop rockets to help bombers take off. As so often with rocket propulsion, the concept of what soon came to be called jet-assisted takeoff, or JATO, looks simple. Getting it to work led the team deeper into the struggle with propellants and combustion stability that helped make “rocket science” a byword for extreme technical challenge.

The 1943 discovery of German rocket activity resulted in acceleration in U.S. work and, at Caltech, the creation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with Qian as a section leader directing research for Private A, the first U.S. solid-propellant missile to perform successfully.

The force that propelled Qian to the heights of the U.S. military technology establishment was the sudden realization of the potential of jet propulsion, including rockets. Almost ignored in the late 1930s, the technology rose by 1944 to first-rank development importance amid the largest war in history.

By early 1945, Qian was in the Pentagon with a high-grade security clearance and writing reports on the latest classified technology nationwide and its implications for future military development.

As a member of the U.S. technical mission that scoured Germany for secrets at the end of the war, he interrogated Wernher von Braun. No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space pro