Egregoros

You're looking in the wrong places.

Here's a dumb simple reproduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=006d36WWyaQ

That is NOT an ionic thruster, it's a Townsend Brown thruster, we know very well how to make them but we lack the physics to understand why they work - and how to make them produce *useful* amounts of thrust.

Paper about them: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040171929/downloads/20040171929.pdf

"they work, we don't know why"

Wikipedos mumbling about ions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biefeld%E2%80%93Brown_effect
(It's been proven that it is not ions.)

Dr. Charles Buhler (NASA electrostatics guru) started a company called Exodus to try to commercialize the thrusters for low thrust satellite applications. Video: Him commenting on the major physics issue with the fact that the thrusters don't actually require power in order to work.

There's another issue with these thrusters which opens a MASSIVE can of worms:

They don't push against anything - they've been tested in sealed containers inside of vacuum chambers and there's nothing being thrown off and nothing being pushed against.

That means, if they produce 1 gram of thrust at "rest" (there's no such thing as "stationary" in a universal sense), they also produce the same thrust at any speed...

That's a Problem for physics, because if you make one spin around in a circle, the faster it spins, the more power it generates (same torque, more RPM), so basically it's a backdoor into Free Energy...

Currently does not work in any meaningful way because the thrust they produce is so small that you can't get them to spin fast enough to extract meaningful power (the structure can't handle the centrifugal force). But they do create theoretical free energy which is at least enough to troll the shit out of physicists...