Shen

Shen, in the Bible, place, perhaps close to Bethel, near which Samuel set up the stone Ebenezer.

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or Shen-yang formerly Mukden

City (pop., 2003 est.: 3,995,500), capital of Liaoning province, northeastern China. An ancient city, it was the Manchu capital (1625–44) before the establishment of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. After 1895 it was fought over by Russia and Japan in the struggle for Manchuria. It was occupied by the Japanese (1931–45). Taken by the communist forces in 1948, it was a base for their conquest of the whole of China. It is one of China's leading industrial cities; its manufactures include machinery, wires and cables, textiles, and chemicals. It is also a cultural and educational centre.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Heshen

or Ho-shen

(born 1750, China—died Feb. 22, 1799, Beijing) Infamous Chinese courtier who abused his influence with the Qianlong emperor to assume high ministerial positions and control revenue disbursements and personnel recruiting. His embezzlement of funds intended for suppressing the White Lotus rebellion prolonged the fighting and drove the imperial troops to looting, consequently undermining the authority of the Qing dynasty. He was arrested by the Qianlong emperor's successor and forced to commit suicide.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Tsien Hsue-shen

Tsien Hsue-shen (born December 11, 1911) is a scientist who was a major figure in the missile and space programs of both the United States and People's Republic of China. NASA documents commonly refer to him as H.S. Tsien.

During the 1940s Tsien was one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. During the red scare of the 1950s the United States government accused Tsien of having communist sympathies. Tsien and his family were imprisoned in an isolated island off Los Angeles. Tsien decided to go back to China. Under the Korean War POW exchange agreement between China & USA, Tsien was arranged to come back to China via Europe. When he eventually returned to China he led the Chinese rocket program, and became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" (or "King of Rocketry").

Asteroid 3763 Qianxuesen was named after him.

Early life and education

Tsien Hsue-shen was born in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, 180 km southwest of Shanghai. He left Hangzhou at the age of three when his father obtained a post in the Ministry of Education in Beijing. He graduated from the National Chiao Tung University (currently Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in 1934 and in August 1935 Tsien Hsue-shen left China on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1936 Tsien Hsue-shen went to the California Institute of Technology to commence graduate studies on the referral of Theodore von Kármán. Tsien obtained his doctorate in 1939 and would remain at Caltech for 20 years, ultimately becoming the Goddard Professor and establishing a reputation as one of the leading rocket scientists in the United States.

It was shortly after arriving at Caltech that Tsien was attracted to the rocketry ideas of Frank Malina and a few other students of von Kármán, and their associates, including Jack Parsons. Around Caltech the dangerous and explosive nature of their work earned them the nickname "Suicide Squad."

Career in the United States

In 1943, Tsien and two others in the Caltech rocketry group drafted the first document to use the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory; it was a proposal to the Army to develop missiles in response to Germany's V-2 rocket. This led to the Private A, which flew in 1944, and later the Corporal, the WAC Corporal, etc.

During the Second World War, he was amongst many scientists who participated in the "Manhattan Project".

After World War II he served under von Kármán as a consultant to the United States Army Air Force, and was eventually given the "assimilated rank of colonel". Von Kármán and Tsien were sent by the Army to Germany to investigate the progress of wartime aerodynamics research. Tsien investigated research facilities and interviewed such German scientists as Wernher von Braun and Rudolph Hermann. Von Kármán wrote of Tsien, “At the age of 36, he was an undisputed genius whose work was providing an enormous impetus to advances in high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion.”

During this time, Colonel Tsien worked on a designing an intercontinental space plane [Tsien Space Plane 1949]. His work would inspire the X-20 Dyna-Soar which would later be the inspiration for the Space Shuttle.

In 1947 Tsien Hsue-shen married Jiang Ying (蒋英), a famed opera singer and the daughter of Jiang Baili (蒋百里) - one of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek's leading military strategists, and his Japanese wife.

Soon after Tsien applied for U.S. citizenship in 1950, allegations were made that he was a communist and his security clearance was revoked. The Federal Bureau of Investigation located a 1938 US Communist Party document with his name on it. Tsien found himself unable to pursue his career and within two weeks announced plans to return to China. After his announcement, the U.S. government imprisoned him in the isolated island off Long Beach. Since he no longer had a security clearance, it was unlikely that he could achieve much for the People's Republic of China by staying in the U.S. Undersecretary of the Navy Dan Kimball tried to keep Tsien in the U.S. commenting "It was the stupidest thing this country ever did...he was no more a Communist than I was and we forced him to go.

Tsien became the subject of five years of secret diplomacy and negotiation between the U.S. and China. During this time he lived under virtual house arrest. Tsien found himself in conflict with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, including an arrest for carrying secret documents which ultimately turned out to be simple logarithmic tables. During his incarceration Tsien received support from his colleagues at Caltech including Caltech President Lee DuBridge, who flew to Washington to argue Tsien's case. Caltech appointed attorney Grant Cooper to defend Tsien. Later, Cooper would say, "That the government permitted this genius, this scientific genius, to be sent to Communist China to pick his brains is one of the tragedies of this century (for the US Empire).

Return to China

In 1955 Tsien was released and deported from the United States together with his wife and their two American-born children as a part of post-Korean war negotiations to free American prisoners of war held by China. He went to work as head of the Chinese missile program immediately upon his arrival in China. Tsien deliberately left his research papers behind when he left the United States. Tsien joined the Communist Party of China in 1958.

Tsien established the Institute of Mechanics and began to retrain Chinese engineers in the techniques he had learned in the United States and retool the infrastructure of the Chinese program. Within a year Tsien submitted a proposal to the PRC government to establish a ballistic missile program. This proposal was accepted and Tsien was named the first director of the program in late 1956. By 1958 Tsien had finalized the plans of the Dongfeng missile which was first successfully launched in 1964 just prior to China's first successful nuclear weapons test. Tsien's program was also responsible for the development of the widespread Silkworm missile. Tsien also contributed a lot to China's Higher Education. He was the first Chairman of the Department of Mechanics of University of Science & Technology of China (USTC), a new type of university established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) after the founding of the New China and aimed at fostering high-level personnel of science and technology absolutely necessary for the development of the national economy, national defense construction, and education in science and technology.

In 1979 Tsien was awarded Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award. In the early 1990s the filing cabinets containing Tsien's research work were offered to him by Caltech. At first Tsien refused but was finally convinced by his former colleagues to accept the work. Most of these works became the foundation for the Tsien Library at Xi'an Jiaotong University while the rest went to the Institute of Mechanics. Tsien eventually received his award from Caltech, and with the help of his friend Frank Marble brought it to his home in a widely-covered ceremony.

Tsien retired in 1991 and has maintained a low public profile in Beijing, China.

The PRC government launched its manned space program in 1992 and used Tsien's research as the basis for the Long March rocket which successfully launched the Shenzhou V mission in October 2003. The elderly Tsien was able to watch China's first manned space mission on television from his hospital bed.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel 2010: Odyssey Two, named a Chinese spaceship after him.

Late life

In his late years, since the 1980s, Tsien advocated scientific investigation of traditional Chinese medicine, Qigong and "special human body functions". Some people declare that Tsien actually did not spend his effort onto Qigong. He just expressed that people should consider the widely spread and practiced Qigong in a scientific manner.

In 2008, he was named Aviation Week and Space Technology Person of the Year. This selection is not intended as an honour but is given to the person judged to have the greatest impact on aviation in the past year.

In 2008, China Central Television named Tsien as one of the eleven most inspiring people in China.

Scientific papers

Tsien HS Two-dimensional subsonic flow of compressible fluids // Aeronaut. Sci. 1939
Von Karman T, Tsien HS. The buckling of thin cylindrical shells under axial compression. J Aeronaut Sci 1941
Tsien, HS 1943 Symmetrical Joukowsky Airfoils in shear flow. Q. Appl. Math.
Tsien, HS, "On the Design of the Contraction Cone for a Wind Tunnel," J. Aeronaut. Sci., 10, 68-70, 1943
Von Karman, T. and Tsien, HS, "Lifting- line Theory for a Wing in Nonuniform Flow," Quarterly of Applied Mathematics, Vol. 3, 1945
Tsien, HS: Similarity laws of hypersonic flows. J. Math. Phys. 25, 247-251, (1946).
Tsien, HS 1952 The transfer functions of rocket nozzles. J. Am. Rocket Soc
Tsien, HS, "Rockets and Other Thermal Jets Using Nuclear Energy", The Science and Engineering of Nuclear Power, Addison-Wesley Vol.11, 1949
Tsien, HS, “Take-Off from Satellite Orbit,” Journal of the American. Rocket Society, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1953
Tsien, HS 1956 The Poincaré-Lighthill-Kuo Method, Advances in Appl. Mech.
Tsien, HS, 1958, "The equations of gas dynamics."
Tsien, HS, "Rockets and Other Thermal Jets Using Nuclear Energy", The Science and Engineering of Nuclear Power, Addison-Wesley

Monographs

Engineering Cybernetics，Tsien, H.S. McGraw Hill， 1954
Tsien, H.S. Technische Kybernetik. Übersetzt von Dr. H. Kaltenecker. Berliner Union Stuttgart 1957
ТЕХНИЧЕСКАЯ　КИБЕРНЕТИКА
Hydrodynamic manuscript facimile, Jiatong University Press, 2007 ISBN 978-7-313-04199-9

References

Chang, Iris (1995). Thread of the Silkworm. Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-465-08716-7.
O'Donnell, Franklin (2002). JPL 101 California Institute of Technology. JPL 400-1048.
Harvey, Brian (2004). China's Space Program: From Conception to Manned Spaceflight. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 1852335661.