Ioncraft.
http://www.markwilson.com/ioncraft/ioncraft.html

 It works by ionizing the air by electrical charge thereby creating an
air flow between the electrodes, generating thrust. There are several
examples of these, called "lifters", made by amateurs:

The Lifters Experiments home page by Jean-Louis Naudin.
http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm

 The problem with them is their power supplies are much heavy than the
weight they can lift. But why not leave the power supply on the ground
and connect it to the craft by  long power cables?

 There are carbon fibers that could support their own weight up to
hundreds of kilometer of altitude:

Carbon fiber (Dani Eder)
http://yarchive.net/space/exot­ic/carbon_fiber.html

 And power transmission lines carry electrical power up to 250km away
at up to 600 megawatts of power:

Baltic-Cable.
http://www.answers.com/topic/baltic-cable?method=5

 This page calculates you can lift 3.91 grams using 7.681 watts of
power or about a ratio of 1 to 2:

Lifter Theory.
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lftheory.htm

 Then you could lift 1,000,000 kg using 2 gigawatts of power. The space
shuttle main engines produce a maximum of 37 million horsepower, or
27.6 gigawatts of power:

Boeing: Rocketdyne: Space Shuttle Main Engine Amazing Facts.
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/propul/SSMEamaz.html

 Then you could leave the large heavy engines and heavy fuel on the
ground and use it just to run electrical generators to drive the
ioncraft.
 If the electrical cable was 4 cm wide made of carbon fiber, a 100km
long cable would have volume Pi*.02^2*100000 = 125.7m^3. At a density
of 1800 kg/m^3 for carbon fiber this would be 226,000 kg. Then twice
this number in kilowatts or 452 megawatts would be needed to support
the weight of the wire alone. You could have take this from the 10's of
gigawatts supplied to the ioncraft or have small versions of the lifter
drive all along the length of the power cable itself drawing off some
portion of the power to support each small portion of the cable.
 The question: how much power would be lost by sending it along a 100km
long cable?

   Bob Clark