Qian Xuesen

Qian Xuesen was born on 11 December 1911 in Hangzhou, China, and died on 31 October 2009 in Beijing. He travelled to the United States in 1935 on a Boxer Indemnity scholarship, earned a master's degree at MIT, then a doctorate at Caltech under Theodore von Karman, and became a founding member of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on early jet-assisted takeoff rocketry and later, during the Second World War, on U.S. missile and rocket research. In 1950, during the Second Red Scare, he was accused of espionage, stripped of his security clearance, and held under house arrest for five years while the case against him was never proven; in 1955 the United States allowed him to leave for China in exchange for American prisoners of war, ending a career the U.S. Navy's own undersecretary at the time said was worth five army divisions. In China he became the founding director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Mechanics in 1956, then led the country's ballistic missile and space rocket programmes, overseeing its first satellite launch in 1970 and laying groundwork later used for its crewed and lunar programmes, earning him the popular title father of Chinese rocketry.