MIT announced in November that a team of engineers led by Steven Barrett “have built and flown the first-ever plane with no moving parts.” The unit (aircraft? drone?) measures 5m across, weighs a touch more than 2 kg, and is powered by an ion drive.
While not a reality until this flight, the ion drive-powered aircraft has long existed in science fiction. It has been linked to Donald Horner’s By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends published in 1910 and Jack Williamson’s The Equalizer published in 1947. The internet told us this — we have not read the books. Point being, ion drive technology has captured the imagination for a long time.
In 1964 the seeming first attempt to deploy an ion drive was launched via the SERT-1 satellite by NASA. It was sent into space via a Scout rocket. Once in space, it activated a Kaufman ion thruster successfully! The ion drive was active for **checks notes** 31 minutes and 16 seconds. More in-flight sitcom than movie.
Piggybacking quickly on this obvious success, NASA sent its Deep Space 1 project into space in 1998. The mission had a lot going on — 12 objectives and a flight path the was to buzz past an asteroid. The ion drive failed initially, but was restored and succeeded in its objective.
The Chief Mission Engineer for the Deep Space 1 was Dr. Marc D. Rayman. In a New York Times article from 1998, Dr. Rayman says he “first heard of ion propulsion in 1968 during a Star Trek episode.” With the promise of a more efficient mode of travel, he predicted at the time that ion drive travel ”has the potential to change everything.” The successful MIT flight is another step in that direction.
While we certainly want to avoid wading into the Star Trek versus Star Wars food fight, it does appear that the most well-known ion drives are not driven by Captain Kirk or NASA. Rather, Darth Vader’s fleet of TIE Fighters are powered by this technology and the TIE acronym itself stands for Twin Ion Engine. The TIE Fighter was famously given its sound by Ben Burtt (Lucas’ own sci-fi DJ Screw) by slowing down and mashing up elephant screams and car tires. It’s not clear how those smart engineers at MIT plan to emulate this critical element of the ion drive’s transition from fiction to fact.
La Hora Del Burro 