The Reality of an Ion Drive

In Star Wars, the TIE fighter is driven by, and gets its name from, Twin Ion Engines. I remember as a kid when I first heard that. TIE just sounded like a made up word, but back then Lucas was smarter than that. Now, Ion Engine, that sounded made up also... But, it's not.

In 1960 at the Glenn Research Center NASA invented the first real life Ion Engine. It works just like the proposed Star Wars ion drives, just on a much smaller scale.

"Ion propulsion is a technology that involves ionizing a gas to propel a craft. Instead of a spacecraft being propelled with standard chemicals, the gas xenon (which is like neon or helium, but heavier) is given an electrical charge, or ionized. It is then electrically accelerated to a speed of about 30 km/second."

NASA first live tested an Ion Drive in it's space craft Deep Space 1 in 1998. Ion Drives are ideal for deep space missions:

"Because the ion propulsion system, although highly efficient, is very gentle in its thrust, it cannot be used for any application in which a rapid acceleration is required.

This means that Ion Propulsion isn't going to get you out of the atmosphere, but once you've escaped Earth's gravity, say into the vacuum of space, it'll take you far, far away.