Concept

Taylor Wang

Summary
Taylor Gun-Jin Wang (; born June 16, 1940) is a Chinese-born American scientist and in 1985, became the first person of Chinese origin to go into space. While an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Wang was a payload specialist on the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51-B. With ancestry in Yancheng, Jiangsu, Republic of China, Wang was born in Shanghai to Wáng Zhāng (王章) and Yú Jiéhóng (俞洁虹/俞潔虹). He moved to Taiwan in 1952 with his family. He studied his later part of elementary school in Kaohsiung, and graduated from The Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan. He later moved to Hong Kong. He started studying physics in UCLA in 1963, and received his Bachelor of Science in 1967, and his Master of Science in 1968, and his doctoral in low temperature physics - Superfluid and solid state physics in 1972 After completing his doctorate, Wang joined the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1972, as a senior scientist. At JPL he was responsible for the inception and development of containerless processing science and technology research. He was the Principal Investigator (PI) on the Spacelab 3 mission NASA Drop Dynamics (DDM) experiments, PI on the NASA SPAR Flight Experiment #77-18 "Dynamics of Liquid Bubble," PI on the NASA SPAR Flight Experiment #76-20 "Containerless Processing Technology," and PI on the Department of Energy Experiment "Spherical Shell Technology." He gained US citizenship in 1975, and published a paper on the dynamic behavior of rotating spheroids in zero gravity the next year. The paper received attention in NASA, and Wang was selected as a payload specialist on June 1, 1983, for the Spacelab-3 mission. Wang conducted precursor drop dynamics experiments for the DDM in ground-based laboratories employing acoustic levitation systems, neutral buoyancy systems and drop towers, and in the near-weightless environment provided by JSC's KC-135 airplane flights and SPAR rockets.
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