---
title: "Spacecraft electric propulsion"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_electric_propulsion"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:55:41.016044+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Spacecraft electric propulsion encompasses propulsion systems that use electric energy to accelerate and expel propellant, generating thrust through electric or magnetic fields. Their principal advantage over chemical rockets is much higher specific impulse, meaning greater propellant efficiency, but the limited electrical power available aboard spacecraft yields much lower thrust, making electric propulsion unsuitable for launch from Earth's surface and better suited to long-duration in-space maneuvers.
The main families of spacecraft electric propulsion include electrostatic devices such as gridded ion engines, Hall-effect thrusters, and colloid thrusters; electromagnetic devices such as pulsed plasma thrusters, magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters, and pulsed inductive thrusters; and electrothermal devices such as resistojets and arcjets. Radio-frequency and electron cyclotron resonance ion engines form a further subclass that avoids physical electrode contact with the propellant plasma.
Electric propulsion concepts date to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's 1911 writings and Robert H. Goddard's 1917 electrostatic accelerator patent, with the first laboratory thruster built by Valentin Glushko at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in 1933. The first electric engine operated in space aboard SERT-1 in 1964, and Hall-effect thrusters entered operational service on Soviet Meteor spacecraft in the 1970s. After the Cold War, Western researchers gained direct access to Soviet Hall thruster technology, and by the late 1990s electric propulsion had entered routine commercial geostationary satellite service and deep-space primary propulsion with Deep Space 1. Later milestones include Dawn's ion-propelled orbits of Vesta and Ceres,  BepiColombo's high-performance gridded ion thruster system, and Psyche's first use of Hall Effect thrusters in interplanetary space.

== Background and history ==

Traditional rocketry has dominated aerospace propulsion in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventional rockets achieve motion by expelling mass, most commonly the combustion output from chemical propellants to generate thrust via Newton's third law, which is the familiar rocket launch with explosive flame and smoke beneath it. Electric propulsion developed as a parallel track for spacecraft propulsion, focusing on electrical and electrostatic methods of accelerating propellant rather than relying solely on chemical combustion.

=== 1900s to the 1950s ===

Early antecedents of electric propulsion emerged by the early 20th century. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky writing in 1911 included an early published statement of the basic electric-propulsion idea: using electricity to increase the velocity of ejected particles. Tsiolkovsky wrote:

It is possible that in time we may use electricity to produce a large velocity for the particles ejected from a rocket device.
Early work on electrostatic acceleration dates to Robert H. Goddard, whose 1917 patent application (granted 1920) Edgar Choueiri has described in Journal of Propulsion and Power as the first documented electrostatic ion accelerator intended for propulsion. In his 1918-1919 manuscript "To whomsoever will read in order to build", Yuri Kondratyuk discussed electric propulsion in the context of cathode rays and described thrust from electrically discharging and repelling material particles, alongside a schematic that Choueiri noted may be the "first conceptualization of a colloid thruster". Hermann Oberth's 1929 book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt defined, in Edgar Choueiri's assessment, 'for the first time publicly and unambiguously' that related propulsion concepts were 'a serious and worthy pursuit in astronautics'.
During the interwar period, early electric-propulsion work began moving from theory toward experiment. Valentin Glushko joined the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in Leningrad in 1929, and by 1933 with staff developed an early electric thruster prototype, an electrothermal approach intended for spacecraft propulsion. The device was likely the first electric thruster to ever be studied on a thruster stand, and was the first electrothermal thruster ever built.
According to Choueiri, early thinking and experimentation in related propulsion research focused mainly on electrostatic concepts, but the first laboratory electric thruster was electrothermal and the first electric thruster to fly in space was a mostly electromagnetic pulsed plasma device. After the 1930s, related electric-propulsion research reached a lull in public published activity for over a decade through and after World War II.
The postwar period saw growing institutional interest in electric propulsion within both military and civilian research programs. The first clear postwar reappearance of these propulsion concepts in open scientific literature was in December 1945, in the Journal of the American Rocket Society, where the term "ion rocket" was first coined by Herbert Radd. In 1947 at Fort Bliss, Wernher von Braun encouraged Ernst Stuhlinger to investigate his spacecraft propulsion ideas, telling Stuhlinger, "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if one day we flew to Mars electrically!"

=== 1960s-1970s ===
During the 1960s through the 1970s, electric and electromagnetic propulsion matured experimentally, with some systems flying in limited operational roles. Electric propulsion research during this period expanded across multiple countries and institutional settings.