[FPSPACE] Qian Xuesen died

[Keith Gottschalk]

thanks, Igor,

   for passing on the news. However inevitable, it is still sad. If only Qian Xuesen had made it to his hundredth birthday! The photos on your link depich him as having over his frail care ward bed a tray with a PC monitor, keyboard, & his spectacles. So even at 98, he was mentally sharp enough to be following Astronautics on the internet.

    He is the last of the founding fathers of space launcher rocketry & astronautics, the generation of Sergei Korolev, Herman Oberth, & Wernher von Braun. 

  At least he lived to see the first Chinese satellite, & the first Chinese taikonaut. He knew that budget is provided for a Salyut-class Chinese space station.  Mark Wade's monumental  25 000-page on-line Encyclopedia Astrinautica, www.astronautix.com  kindly makes assessible my poem of tribute.

  CELESTIAL EMPIRE

 Qian Xuessen 1911 - 2009

the Great Ocean
two shores, two realms
the western shore: jade
the eastern shore: coca-cola
above: the realm that calls

on the eastern shore
you, father, birthed the rocket:
their door that clanged behind you
was not lacquered in vermilion

on the western shore
renaissance of flying dragons
you, midwife, let fly a new moon
you, bamboo too often bent
by the rage of typhoons

Feng Jishen smiles with Qian Xuessen
to see the Fifth Academy & Seventh Ministry
fly Dong Fang Hong & Shenzhou:
build from Jiuquan a silk road to the sky.

                   - Keith Gottschalk
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Feng Jishen - inventor of rocket, 970 AD
Qian Xuessen - father of Chinese space programme, victimized under McCarthyism and the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution.
Fifth Academy & Seventh Ministry - code names for space department
Dong Fang Hong - 1st Chinese satellite
Shenzhou - 1st Chinese manned spacecraft
Jiuquan - China’s Cape Canaveral