中国顶级科学家钱学森去世了，不少悼念文章还是老调重弹，称颂他当年一腔赤子之情，放弃在美国的优厚待遇和良好条件，毅然回国参加新中国的建设，美国官员很后悔钱老回国，说宁愿枪毙了他，因为他可以顶5个师，云云。
于是想到去年钱老的堂侄钱永健获得诺贝尔奖后谈到钱学森时说的一段似乎透着不屑的话：“My father""""s cousin was quite a famous engineer (H.S. Tsien). He was the headof the ballistic missile program for the People""""s Republic. It""""s actually astrange tale. He was at Cal Tech as an aeronautical engineer, but then gotin trouble in the 1950s because he had some communist links in his past. Hewas put under house arrest and then deported. Back in China, he started upthe ballistics program, I guess partly because he was mighty pissed off atthe US!”/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2064723“我父亲的堂兄是一个很有名的工程师（钱学森）。
他是中华人民共和国弹道导弹计划的头儿。
这实际上是一个古怪的故事。
他在加州理工学院当一个航空工程师，但后来在20世纪50年代陷入了麻烦，因为他过去有一些共产主义联系。
他被软禁，然后被驱逐出美国。
回到中国后，他开始了弹道导弹计划，我猜部分是因为他对美国非常生气！”钱永健的这番话与我们耳熟能详的宣传口径是多么矛盾！最有意思的是钱永健用“piss off ”一词，字面本义是“撒尿赶走人”，意思是“立刻滚开”，好像比中文里的“扫地出门”要严重些，引申为“激怒”“使人气恼”，用作被动语态则表示处于生气状态。
所以这句话隐含的意思是，美国撒尿赶走钱学森，把钱学森惹毛了！更详细的资料，这里有美国权威的“航空和空间技术周刊”上的一篇文章则非常详细地叙述了钱老的专长，贡献以及回国前后的波折，足以佐证钱永健的说法，彻底推翻钱老“放弃优越条件，毅然回国报效”的爱国主义宣传的高大形象。
因为钱老是被驱逐出境的，当时他正在申请美国国籍，企图留在美国！有兴趣的朋友不妨看看（我只择其要点翻译一下，全文太长，这里也不能全贴出来）：/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=space&id=news/aw010708p1.xmlQian Xuesen Laid Foundation For Space Rise in China（钱学森为中国太空技术发展奠定了基础）Jan 6, 2008By Bradley Perrett........（介绍中国空间技术如导弹打掉废弃卫星，载人火箭，嫦娥一号等）The man who laid the foundation for these achievements is a brilliant scientist who worked for the U.S. military on advanced rocket projects in the 1940s and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Then, in a remarkably short-sighted move, the U.S. sent this man back to China with all his skills and knowledge of American secrets. With McCarthyism in full bloom, the scientist was deported on dubious charges of being a Communist.为这些成就奠定基础的是一位了不起的科学家，他与1940年代在先进的火箭工程上为美国军队工作过，并帮助建立了加州理工学院喷气推进实验室。
然后，由于显然短时的处理措施，美国把这个人连同他掌握的所有技术和美国机密一起送回了中国。
由于麦卡锡主义处于全盛时期，这位科学家被莫须有地指控为共产党员。
That man is Qian Xuesen. And he became the father of the Chinese space program.............这个人就是钱学森，中国空间技术之父。
The story of how China got Qian back from the U.S. has been told many times, not least in the early 1950s, when it was current news. But it’s a fascinating story, and is well worth retelling as we watch China’s latest strides forw ard.中国如何从美国把钱弄到手的故事，被重复传诵着，尤其1950年代，是轰动一时的新闻。
但这是一个很迷人的故事，值得再次述说，尤其当我们看到中国最近取得的进展的时候。
Qian was born in 1911, in the last weeks of Chinese imperial history, and at 23 traveled to the U.S. on a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Preferring theory to the practice that MIT then emphasized, he soon moved to Caltech and began to follow a path that would lead to his becoming one of the most eminent rocket scientists in the U.S.钱生于1911年，出生后几周清帝国就崩溃了。
23岁时他获得奖学金到美国麻省理工学习航空工程。
由于麻省理工注重理论胜过实践，他很快转学到加州理工学院，走上了使他成为美国最著名火箭科学家之一的道路。
While his own country was racked by political division, invasion by Japan and, finally, civil war, Qian became a star pupil of the director of Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronauti cal Laboratory,the Hungarian-American engineer and physicist Theodore von Karman. Still in his 20s, Qian became involved in experiments in rocketry, a field that at that time, the late 1930s, was barely taken seriously.当他的祖国处于政治分裂，遭日本侵略，最后又爆发内战的时候，钱成为加州理工古根海姆航空实验室导师，匈牙利裔美国工程师和物理学家提奥多冯卡门的得意门生。
还在20多岁的青年时期，钱参与了火箭实验，这个领域当时和30年代末期，还是冷门。
But the U.S. Army Air Corps did begin to take it seriously in 1939, tasking Caltech, including Qian, to develop rockets to help bombers take off. 。
但美国空军1939年就看好这个专业，要求加州理工--包括钱--发展火箭以帮助轰炸机起飞。
.。
.By early 1945, Qian was in the Pentagon with a high-grade security clearance and writing reports on the latest classified technology nationwide and its implications for future military development.1945年初，钱学森获得高级别的机密工作许可证，进入五角大楼工作，并就全美国最新的绝密技术的发展状况及其未来在军事上的潜在可能性撰写报告。
As a member of the U.S. technical mission that scoured Germany for secrets at the end of the war, he interrogated Wernher von Braun. No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space program.钱是战争末尾时负责搜寻德国科学机密的技术委员会的成员，他讯问了沃纳·冯·布劳恩（德国火箭研究小组负责人，运载火箭之父）。
当时没有人知道，这是美国未来的空间技术之父遭到未来中国空间技术之父的讯问。
V on Karman vouched for Qian to join the Scientific Advisory Board, set up to advise the head of the Air Force. “At the age of 36, he was an undisputed genius whose work was providing an enormous impetus to advances in high-speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion,” von Karman later wrote, explaining the move.冯卡门推荐钱学森加入了给美国空军领导人提供建议的科学顾问委员会。