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Comment by yapcguy | Hacker News Reader

I have submitted this as a separate story as I believe it merits discussion regarding the links between China and America's space program.

Bassically the Co-Founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was deported from the US to China during the McCarthy era and he became the "Father" of China's space program.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905862

Wikipedia writes, "Under Secretary Kimball, who had tried to keep Qian in the U.S., commented on the affair to say: "It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."

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As I understand it, much of NASA was manned by Germans who had worked on their rocket program (weaponized rockets) and 'importing' that knowledge was the kick start to the American space program. Project Paperclip? Was that the name?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

Ah I was close :D Thanks for the link!

nasa and jpl aren't the same thing.

Yes (especially back then, because NASA did not exist until 1958).

I know of three strands of rocketry research that contributed to American rocketry. There was Robert Goddard's experiments with liquid-fueled rockets, as early as the 1920s, Theodore von Karman (a Hungarian who emigrated to the US in 1930) and his team at Caltech, and von Braun and the Germans.

Goddard never got significant US Government support, but he continued his experiments right up to 1940. Of course von Braun did get government support, and apparently his team learned from Goddard's experiments. The end result was that von Braun's team knew more about large rockets, and he went on to head the NASA center (Huntsville) that is most associated with rocketry, and of course to develop the Saturn V. And von Karman, of course, was the founder of JPL.

As @err4nt's comment hints at, there is a rough parallel between von Karman's emigration from Germany to the US (his family was Jewish) and Qian's emigration from the US to China.

JPL seems to have had quite a few founders. I recall reading about Jack Parsons who was also into occult matters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whiteside_Parsons

Happen to run into his story while reading about the history of Rocketry. His story even takes a more bizarre turn with L Ron. Hubbard, and finally his death in a mysterious explosion.

Indeed. I first read the hints of that story in Mike Davis's book City of Quartz.

Another interesting co-founder (one of the original handful, along with Parsons) was Frank Malina, who was the second director of JPL (after von Karman).

Malina was also suspected by the FBI of having Communist sympathies. He eventually left JPL and went to live in France.

I was just trying to point out that it's not like the US's space exploration program was built from the ground up on US soil, it involved importing expertise. That's what China seems to have done here too - imported expertise to kick-start a program. I don't see anything wrong with it, just figured some people may not be aware of that part of US history.

> That's what China seems to have done here too

No, it wasn't. America intentionally established Operation Paperclip with the intention of recruiting German scientists. The Chinese didn't have to do anything to get Qian (and most likely weren't even thinking about space in 1950) - America just handed him to them, thanks to the US government's enormous stupidity.

> It was the stupidest thing this country ever did

That's a pretty big claim

It's probably more a figure of speech than it is a claim.

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