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Space And A Stupid Government
by Paul McGoldrick
This has been a remarkable week for space. Masten Space Systems with their Xoie rocket edged out Armadillo Aerospace by more accurately landing their lunar landing module closer to the target on both of two trips in the Lunar Landing Challenge run by the X Prize Foundation.
Masten walks away with one million dollars, although it is estimated that the design and execution of the project cost them in excess of ten million. Armadillo takes home five hundred thousand dollars but also won three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the earlier Level 1 challenge last year.
The competition – in which there were four entries, three getting to flight status – was NASA-originated with commercial funding provided by Northrop Grumman, the successor to the company that built the Apollo modules. The notion was that alternative technologies could be found for reusable lunar modules, and both the winning companies achieved that in spades, at a much lower price than NASA could have ever done.
But in this same week that new technology forged ahead for possible future lunar expeditions, there was sad news, from China.
Qian Xuesen (aka Tsien Hsue-shen), was born in Hangzhou – in Eastern China – and in 1934 graduated from Jiaotong University. Aged ninety-eight years of age, he died in Beijing this last week. He won a scholarship to MIT as an aeronautical engineer, followed by a doctorate at Caltech, and was one of the active founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he was regarded as a genius and quite remarkable mathematician.
But his remarkable career in jet-assisted take-off technology came to a screeching halt in 1950 when the FBI decided to label him as a communist and spy. That position continued right through 1999 when the Congress Cox Report determined that he was the person who leaked information to China that allowed them to develop ICBMs, satellites, and the deadly Silkworm anti-ship missile.
And he probably was.
But when? He was arrested after trying to return to China with his family and a bunch of crates of his family belongings – which the FBI claimed contained state secrets – but the charges were never followed through, although he was held for five years.
Eventually he and his family were deported, apparently in exchange for a dozen or so US prisoners of war from the Korean conflict.
This man, insulted by his adopted country, was going to do what when he returned to China? He advanced that country’s exploration of space, of weaponry, of satellites, by twenty years. His security clearance – one of the highest available to an engineer – had given him access to information that many people can only dream about. What incredible stupidity of the United States to put China in a position to threaten the western world with technology they themselves developed.
I once shared the dinner table with Tsien in Beijing. He was delightful, funny, and curious. How wrong can America be when it loads the shotgun of your own adversary?
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