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Thanks for providing that. It does prove my point though. That plane is not flying at all. It is falling with style. The initial forward momentum is from the launch rail, not from the electrostatic propulsion.


At 2:11 you can see it moving in a straight line.


Not shown: all the momentum imparted by the launch itself.


For the Nature paper they compared unpowered vs powered flight. Unpowered got about 10m, powered got to 60m, the length of their test facility.


In that clip it is not slowing down, showing that the ion drive is generating sufficient thrust to sustain flight. It's irrelevant that it used assistance to initially reach that speed.




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