Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money” How does this man not have a movie?
He has a TV show called Strange Angel, and it's pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Angel
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Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
61–70 of 134 posts
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#62That'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 l…
> The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy.
What are you talking about? The article doesn't say no one made a movie about him.
There are at least three Chinese movies and a TV series about him.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#63Fun 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.
In his later years (late 1980s), he also advocated for AI and human superpower research.
The superpower thing turned out to be pseudoscience later. As a result of being lumped together, for a long period of time, AI was regarded as pseudoscience in China as well.
Although to be fair, during the same period, the US and the USSR were researching superpowers as well.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#64Not 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.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#65The 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).
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#66Wernher von Braun didn't have a rival/opponent nation he could betray America to. Qian Xuesen did and did.
Did you forget that most of his colleagues worked with the USSR? Von Braun was just lucky that the US got to him and captured him first.
Dumb comment. Nazis were blood enemies of communists. They didn’t want to fight the Americans or even the British.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#67I 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 F…
The FBI's practice of tracking "suspected communists" literally comes from the Red Scare. The McCarthyist era, which you seem to be calling "The Red Scare", is known as "The Second Red Scare". The First Red Scare followed the October Revolution pretty much immediately, and is the condition under which the FBI started surveiling suspected communists in 1919.
When Qian was asked to testify against Sidney Weinbaum, it was during the Second Red Scare.
All of this is absolutely tied up with those moral panics.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#68I 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 F…
Every other intellectual and artist was a communist or socialist back then, but not in any way that seriously threatened the state. They all happily worked on the bomb, after all.
I mean there's a reason why USSR got to develop nuclear bomb so quickly.
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#69The 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...
Re: Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties. At least on the American side, it doesn't sound at all like this was uniformly agreed upon; there seem to have been people on the American side (including at least one relatively high-ranking military/government official) who felt strongly that this was a strategic blunder. That doesn't mean your c…
Ah, I wasn't clear I see. Okay, my position is not that the representation is inaccurate but that given the representation it is not clear that it was the wrong decision. The post draws a line from Xuesen's deportation, to his actions in China, to China's present-day military aviation. But that is only a blunder if the counterfactual is that China would not have achieved that military aviation as fast. The picture dr…
> But that is only a blunder if the counterfactual is that China would not have achieved that military aviation as fast. The picture drawn is that the Chinese had a sophisticated and intelligent organizational apparatus that knew to get key players and empower them to create successful organizations.
I think the potential difference here is that the contemporary Chinese government was still pretty new at the time; they only fully took power in 1949, a year before his house arrest started and five years before they were able to have him begin working for them. It isn't that implausible to me that a government less than a decade old might not have a consensus around how to plan longer-term projects, and I don't think that knowing who the right person for a job is can be equated to the knowledge to do the job itself. My reading of the article is an argument that the national security policy of the US was not compatible with the type of planning that would be needed for technological superiority in the long term; they're saying that while they might be aligned for a short time due to the priorities during a time of outright war, in the long term the priorities of the way the US strives for national security change much more due to immediate circumstances.
> Integrating him after imprisonment would surely have been hard. So the counterfactual is that we don't do the prisoner exchange and find a way to hold him indefinitely?
I'm realizing now that I think I might have been conflating this article with another one that seems to have been flagged and the comments moved here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207251), which made the argument that the imprisonment was the unsalvageable mistake. (I guess it was LLM generated? I've suspected for a while that I'd probably be bad at recognizing whether content is "real" or not, so I'm not totally surprised that it wasn't obvious to me when I read it before anyone had flagged or commented on it).