QIAN-XUESEN (H.S.TSffiN), HIS EARLY SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR IN ASTRONAUTICS

摘要

H. S. Tsien is accounted as the most notorious Chinese scientist in Astronautics and the creator of the present Chinese space program and there are serious reasons to sustain that. His engineering and doctoral formation is of American and German extraction indeed, after he won a scholarship contest and travelled from China to the United States as early as in 1935, when he was only 24. Inception of his scientific work is thus greatly influenced by the American school of engineering, with emphasize on experimental work, while simultaneously keeping his cognitive tools deep into the theoretical investigation. Within this environmental context his early published work makes profit of the excellent cooperation with Theodor von Karman, his doctoral director, recently emigrated to Caltech from the Nazi Germany, and shows an unusually wide field of endeavour, a general feature indeed of all major scientists in Astronautics. A series of consistent contributions in science has been thus issued. While Tsien's scientific work after his return to China in 1955 remains unknown, the Elsevier publishers, through their Academic Press collection, has recently gathered and republished, as a late consideration, Tsien's entire early scientific papers in an excellent collection entitled "Collected Works of Hsue-Shen Tsien, 1938-1956" that demonstrates his wide area of coverage in the problem of Astronautics. During this tender youth of Astronautics a stark group of different scientists has approached the basic problems of the then fantastic avenue towards space technology. From Poincare to Levi Civitta and Meschersky or Hamel, physicists and mathematicians have been attracted by the strange behaviour of variable mass bodies in motion. Some of them have also approached the manner into which the variable mass body motion can achieve an optimal proficiency. All the early published work of H. S. Tsien has the imprint of the meticulous, rigorous and extraordinarily clear mathematical thinking. This main characteristic of Tsien's creativity has arose to a marvellous peek in the 1951, when his paper with R. Evans on the variational solution of Optimal Thrust Programming for a Sounding Rocket has seen the daylight in the famous Jet Propulsion journal, although it is still a less cited publication of Tsien. The area of coverage of Tsien's research work is described in the paper, with emphasize on that contribution in the applied calculus of variations.