Qian Xuesen is one of the greatest scientists who devoted all their lives to China's science and technology. In 1911, he was born in Hangzhou, eastern China. Qian received a mechanical engineering degree in 1934 in Shanghai and went to the United States on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at MIT at the age of 23. As a student at MIT, and later as a scientist and teacher at the California Institute of Technology, Mr.Qian played a central role in early United States' efforts to develop jet aircraft and rocketry technology. Mr. Qian served on the United States government's Science Advisory Board during World War II. His teacher and colleague, the Caltech physicist Theodore von Karmon, praised him as "a brain whose work will change the world greatly". In the 1940s Qian wrote an article for a famous magazine on a winged space plane that led to develop NASA's new space shuttle. In 1955 he came back to his motherland from the US. Under his leadership, China produced its first missile called Long March, and in 1970, launched its first satellite. He was considered as the father of the country's first ballistic missiles, first satellite and the Silkworm anti-ship missile. In 2009, he died in Beijing. When coming back from America, Qian Xuesen was   _
23 44 59 89