Qian Xuesen

Qian Xuesen was born in Hangzhou in 1911 and came to the United States in 1935 on a scholarship funded by Boxer Rebellion indemnity money. After a master\'s at MIT he joined Theodore von Kármán at Caltech, where a group of students experimenting with rockets on the edge of campus were nicknamed the Suicide Squad after an explosion. He was their theorist. The group grew into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which he helped found in 1943.

He was made a colonel in the US Army Air Forces and sent to Germany in 1945 to question Wernher von Braun and the other rocket engineers. He was, by common consent, one of the leading rocket scientists in America, and applied for citizenship.

In 1950, at the height of the anti-communist scare, his security clearance was revoked on the strength of allegations that he had attended communist meetings in the 1930s. No evidence was produced. When he tried to leave for China he was arrested and held, then kept under partial house arrest and surveillance for five years, cut off from his own work. In 1955 he was deported in exchange for American pilots captured in Korea. A former Navy under-secretary later called it the stupidest thing the country ever did.

In China he built the ballistic missile programme from nothing and led the work that put the first Chinese satellite into orbit in 1970. He died in 2009 aged 97.