The Chinese-born Tsien Hsue-shen — or, as currently transliterated, Qian Xue-sen — became an early member of the Caltech rocketry inner circle after arriving on campus in 1936 as a 25-year-old grad student. He and
two others wrote the successful 1943 proposal to the U.S. Army that was the first document using the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With full security clearance and the rank of colonel, he interrogated Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun in 1945 on behalf of the U.S. military.
In 1950, as McCarthyism swept the country, federal agents questioned Tsien about accusations of attending Communist meetings in the 1930s. He denied ever being a Communist. When his security clearance was revoked, Tsien decided to return to China — but U.S. officials concluded he knew too much, and kept him under virtual house arrest for five years with the aim of allowing his technical knowledge to become gradually outdated. During negotiations in 1955 on the return of American prisoners of war from Korea, the Chinese made the release of Tsien an explicit condition. President Dwight Eisenhower personally agreed, and later that year Tsien left for China.
Tsien subsequently headed projects for China that developed the surface-to-ship “Silkworm” missile. He is widely acknowledged as the father of the Chinese missile program. In the 1970s he began developing a
space program for China that put that country’s first satellites into orbit.
Over the course of his career in China, Tsien met Mao Tse-tung six times and personally tutored the Chinese premier. He survived the Cultural Revolution of 1968 and supported the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Tsien later withdrew to a life in seclusion in a guarded residential compound in Beijing. In December 2001, Frank Marble, a Caltech professor emeritus, visited Tsien in China and, at the request of Caltech President David Baltimore, presented him with a Distinguished Alumni Award that the Institute had presented to Tsien in absentia 23 years earlier.