Flight of an aeroplane with solid-state propulsion

There is a comment from Pubpeer [0] on this research [1] if anyone is curious: "This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006. MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft." [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 [1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U

General note to naysayers: before you present yet another "obvious" argument why Zubrin's proposal can't possibly work, you may want to check how it applies to this: http://news.mit.edu/2018/first-ionic-wind-plane-no-moving-pa... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 It's essentially the same thing, except it has to ionize the medium (air) on its own rather than just pick up the ions from its surroundings. (Yes, it does so in front of the vehicle, so on average stripped-off electrons get less work done on them by the electric field than positive ions, but the electrons would carry less momentum than the more massive ions even at kinetic energy parity, with the difference going to the vehicle, as Zubrin correctly says - please let's not beat that dead horse again.)

If you want source material, it's a paper that was published in Nature in November (abstract at [0]) including video [1] and full system parameters [2]. It weighs 2.45 kg and has a wingspan of 5m. It flew multiple times and the distance flown / total time time in the air was limited by the size of the hangar that was used for the flight trials, not the ion drive. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 [1] https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9/tables/1

Nature letter here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 Looks like they developed advancements with lightweight high-voltage converters and performance of the thrusters.