At the end of November, the team of Professor Jiang Zonglin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Mechanics published a research paper in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, a peer-reviewed academic publication. In his paper, he claimed that the Academy has developed a “standing oblique detonation ramjet engine,” or sodramjet for short. The team said that the engine could take a flight at up to 16 times the speed of sound and an aircraft powered by such an engine could reach anywhere in the world within two hours. Radio Free Asia (December 6) pointed out that according to the South China Morning Post, the sodramjet was an American idea. An engineer named Richard Morrison came up with the idea and presented it in a 1980 paper that can be downloaded from NASA’s website. Dr. Uzi Rubin, founder and first director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, an expert in hypersonic missiles, said the new design was still “very experimental” and its advantages still remained uncertain. He said, “Even though it looks promising … it will take about a generation for it to be used commercially.”  “I believe that hypersonic human flight is not imminent, if it can be done at all.”