The ioncraft is a method proposed for decades for aircraft and spacecraft propulsion:
Ioncraft.
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.
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)
And power transmission lines carry electrical power up to 250km away at up to 600 megawatts of power:
Baltic-Cable.
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.
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.
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