Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

PaulHoule

What became JPL had numerous colorful characters who had trouble with the security apparatus not least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons who invented modern composite solid rockets and was also a collaborator of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.

feverzsj

Qian is a typical opportunist, who had been contacting ccp since 1930s. He was already away from military and academia for years, while pouring huge sum of money into his immigration case. After deported from US, his job in China was mostly management.

arjie

An error rate of 0 is unachievable. Given that, it’s a question of your tolerance for error and the consequences of the opposite kind of error. Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties. The Chinese outcome was not nearly so certain even in 1990, half a century after the events in question. The counterfactual that China could not have indigenously achieved this also seems unlikely. After all, the thesis is that Chinese leaders were so organizationally intelligent that they recognized key players that could implement century-long organizational methodology improvements. Given that they could get that far, it seems unlikely that they could not take the next step: that of recreating/finding a Qian Xuesen within their own country; like we found Oppenheimer. Overall, this seems like a strategic choice that played off roughly at the risk control level it was aimed at. You cannot judge decisions solely by outcomes.

ailun

Definitely a famous story that gets retold and almost mythologized in China. When I taught over there, several different middle school students independently told me about this story.

Animats

That's fascinating. The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy. That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring. Nobody ever made a biopic about Charles Wilson, head of defense production at General Motors during WWII, and later US Secretary of Defense. Hyman Rickover, who headed the 1950s effort to build nuclear submarines and warships, only has a low budget 2021 documentary. Malcom McLean, who converted the world to containerized shipping and made low-cost imports possible, never got a movie. Those three people each changed the world more than any celebrity. They're well known in business history. MBAs study them. There are biographies. But no movie.

culi

If anyone wants to listen to it without the paywall, it's just an iframe and you can literally just remove the "paywall" query param: https://player.instaread.co/player?article=the-missile-geniu... EDIT: it's ai if anyone is curious

MaxPock

Fun fact;In 1992 ,he advised Chinese leaders to focus on new energy vehicles as they would never catch up on ice. Looks like his counsel was taken as we can see the results today.

catigula

Wernher von Braun didn't have a rival/opponent nation he could betray America to. Qian Xuesen did and did.

porphyra

The US continues to repeat this mistake by adding hurdles for immigrant talent while persecuting or being generally racist against Chinese-American scientists [1]. Despite that, there's still a net influx of foreign talent coming to the US whereas relatively few people move to China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_the_...

fakedang

Also Erdal Arikan. Turkish researcher denied a Green Card, so he was invited by the Chinese Govt. to capitalize on his research there instead. His work led to 5G technology.

LAC-Tech

I feel like this article is leaving some important bits out for the sake of a narrative. From Wikipedia By the early 1940s, U.S. Army Intelligence was already aware of allegations that Qian was a communist This predates the red scare - at the time the US was in bed with "Uncle Joe" Stalin. While at Caltech, Qian had secretly attended meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons, and Frank Malina that were organized by the Russian-born Jewish chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party.[43] Weinbaum's trial commenced on August 30 and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him.[44] Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.[45] Qian was taken into custody on September 6, 1950, for questioning [7] and for two weeks was detained at Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to Theodore von Kármán's autobiography, when Qian refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum, the FBI decided to launch an investigation on Qian.[46] This seems incredibly pertinent to the story as well.

yanhangyhy

I don't think he is a communist, he just believe in people like Mao and he's party. The other thing is,as a Chinese person, apart from a very small minority who are receptive to Western propaganda and hold anti-Han/chinese/china sentiments, the vast majority will eventually embrace their strong sense of nationalism. This also applies to Chen-Ning Yang.

sieve

Not comparable, but the story of Gerald Bull is interesting. I read Frederick Forsyth's The Fist of God in the late 90s and only came to know about Bull and Project Babylon when I chanced upon the Wikipedia article on the subject.

photochemsyn

The article unfortunately neglects most of backstory in favor of a ‘unique genius came out of nowhere’ narrative. Qian was a member of the Caltech Suicide Squad that did things like build the WAC Corporal sounding rocket, which carried 25 lbs of scientific instrumentation to ~20 miles. That was headed by Frank Malina, under the equally remarkable Theodore von Kármán, and Qian was a prominent member. That was only made possible by the foundation of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech (GALCIT), which got its funding from the U.S. Army Air Corps for jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) units - so it was a contract research lab. The specific funding train came from Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold of the Air Corps, who wanted to use rockets to get heavy bombers off short Pacific runways. von Kármán’s role was larger than just GALCIT (and interestingly, was a Jewish-Hungarian who settled in the USA in 1930, a bit of a mirror of Qian’s trajectory). The intersection of von Kármán and Qian Xuesen is highlighted in this fascinating and comprehensive collection of the program’s results as pdfs: https://www.governmentattic.org/TwardNewHorizons.html “The resulting multi-volume report, collectively titled: "Toward New Horizons," was hugely influential, even having been credited with leading to America's postwar airpower dominance. The report is widely cited, but references are largely to the introductory/summary volume, "Science, the Key to Air Supremacy” “Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien [aka Qian Xuesen], principal author-editor of the entire report series, later after returning to The People's Republic of China, was the founder of China's ballistic missile programs and became known as the Father of Chinese Rocketry.” Finally, without the Maoist government’s decision to devote massive state resources to a missile/space program, there would similarly have been no ground for Qian to cultivate in China. Conclusion? The ‘great genius’ narratives of scientific and engineering history do contain a grain of truth (Qian published >50 papers many foundational) but are commonly oversold as examples of heroic individualism, presenting a rather distored lens on historical developments (and confusing many young students about how the world really works).

salynchnew

The Failure to Launch episode about Qian, the Cultural Revolution, and the brief inter-departmental war and attempted "coup" at the defense research institute where he worked... was quite something. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rocket-scientist-g...