from World Daily, B1, March 19, 1999
Translated by Jianli Chen, University of Texas at Austin

Mr. Shunguang Cheung, living in Long Island, New York, holds a degree in mechanical engineering. Before starting a wholesale business, he had a dream of becoming an engineer or a pilot. Well, his dream will soon be realized by his son, Donglin Cheung (Daniel Cheung), a 21-year-old college student. An experiment proposal designed by Cheung aroused great interest at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He was invited to the NASA Texas space center to continue his experiment. Today, at 9:30 am, Cheung will take a ride on the NASA weightless airplane to fly into the atmosphere at a height of 34,000 feet and do his experiment in a weightless environment. He is, so far, the first Chinese-American college student to do experiments in inner space.

Born in America, Cheung is a senior in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Vermont. A mechanical experiment designed by Cheung and his classmates drew great attention from NASA. NASA invited his team to the space center to carry out  four weeks of physical and scientific training, and also remarkably allows them to use the weightless airplane of the Johnson Space Center, which is specially designed to train astronauts. A separate laboratory is set up in the cabin to let Cheung and his teammates do the experiment. His father, Mr. Shunguang Cheung (immigrated from Hong Kong), said that his son’s experiment needed to be carried out in a weightless environment, so after evaluating the proposal his school felt it was an excellent one and sent it to the NASA Educational Center, and therefore they received this unique and valuable opportunity.

The NASA Johnson Space Center is a special institute which provides a weightless environment for space research. In 1959 this center started research on how to study astronauts’ adaptability and possible reactions to a weightless environment, without going into outer space. The special airplane developed by this center can produce a kind of weightless environment by being able to climb and descend very quickly along a projectile orbit in the atmosphere. Cheung is going to ride in this kind of airplane to do his experiment and research at a height of 34,000 ft.

Since his father has a hobby of building and operating model airplanes and automobiles, Cheung has developed a high interest in mechanical things since his childhood. When his father built airplane models, he was learning along side him. He received his license for remote-control model airplanes when he was only 7 years’ old. While a student at Long Island Herricks High School, he represented his school by participating in the National Bridge-Design Contest for two consecutive years.  He won the National Champion and the second place, respectively, in these two contests, a proud achivement.

His father and his mother, Huaizhen Chen (from Taiwan), are very delighted to see that their son is collaborating with NASA scientists to do the experiment. Mr. Cheung said his son talked with them on the phone every day during the intense training to describe his daily work and progress. However, Donglin Cheung has never talked about the details of his experiment, which his father is actually very curious about. According the schedule, Cheung will return home from Texas this weekend. His parents are going to take him to a Dim-Sum restaurant and hear about his experience in weightlessness.