Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Is Dead at 98

BEIJING — Qian Xuesen, a brilliant rocket scientist who single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts after he was drummed out of the United States during the redbaiting of the McCarthy era, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 98.

China’s state media reported the death. Mr. Qian had been frail and bedridden in recent years.

In China, Mr. Qian was celebrated as the father of Chinese rocketry, the leader of the research that produced the nation’s first ballistic missiles, its first satellite and the Silkworm anti-ship missile.

But in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, he was no less valuable, if not so publicly celebrated, as a pioneer in American jet and rocket technology.

As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later as a scientist and teacher at the California Institute of Technology, Mr. Qian, also known as Tsien Hsue-shen, played a central role in early United States efforts to exploit jet and rocket propulsion.

As a graduate assistant at Caltech in the late 1930s, Mr. Qian helped conduct seminal research into rocket propulsion, and in the 1940s he helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, now one of NASA’s premier space-exploration centers.

Mr. Qian served on the United States government’s Science Advisory Board during World War II and, on the war front in Germany, advised the Army on ballistic-missile guidance technology. At the war’s end, holding the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, he debriefed Nazi scientists, including Werner von Braun, and was sent to analyze Hitler’s V-2 rocket facilities.

In the 1940s his mentor and colleague, the Caltech physicist Theodore von Karman, called Mr. Qian “an undisputed genius whose work was providing an enormous impetus to advances in high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion.” In 1949, he wrote a proposal for a winged space plane that the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, in 2007, called an inspiration for research that led to NASA’s space shuttle.

But by 1950 Mr. Qian’s American career was over. Shortly after applying for permission to visit his parents in the newly Communist China, he was stripped of his security clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and accused of secretly being a Communist. The charge was based on a 1938 United States Communist Party document that showed he had attended a social gathering that the F.B.I. suspected was a meeting of the Pasadena Communist Party.

Mr. Qian denied the charges, his Caltech colleagues rushed to his defense, and the university hired a lawyer to assist him. Mr. Qian first sought to return to China, but was placed under virtual house arrest by the government; later, he sought to stay and fight the accusations, but the government sought to deport him.

In 1955, Mr. Qian was sent back to China, where he was proclaimed a hero and immediately put at work developing Chinese rocketry. By many accounts, he later became a committed Communist and served on the party’s ruling body, the Central Committee.

The loyalty allegations have never been fully resolved. Aviation Week, which named Mr. Qian its man of the year in 2007, quoted Dan Kimball, a former under secretary of the Navy, as calling Mr. Qian’s deportation “the stupidest thing this country ever did.” A 1999 United States Congress report on Chinese espionage called Mr. Qian a spy, but critics say the report provides no basis other than a claim that he passed to China the secrets of the American Titan missile program, which began years after he had been deported.

Qian Xuesen was born in 1911, as the Chinese imperial government was collapsing, in Hangzhou, in eastern China. He earned a mechanical engineering degree in 1934 in Shanghai. At the age of 23, he went to the United States on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at M.I.T. Later, at Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, Mr. Qian met Mr. von Karman, who recommended him for the Science Advisory Board and gave him the lead role in research that developed the first American solid-fuel rocket to be successfully launched.

After his deportation, Mr. Qian wrote a position paper for Chinese leaders on aviation and defense, according to the state-run news service Xinhua.

Under his leadership, China developed its first generation of “Long March” missiles and, in 1970, launched its first satellite. Most of China’s recent space achievements, such as its manned space program, began long after Mr. Qian’s retirement.

Mr. Qian never returned to the United States, but in a 2002 reminiscence, a Caltech colleague and professor, Frank Marble, stated that he believed Mr. Qian “lost faith in the American government, but I believe he has always had very warm feelings for the American people.”

Caltech gave Mr. Qian its distinguished alumni award in 2001.