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The first person who wrote a paper introducing the idea publicly was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1911. The technique was recommended for near-vacuum conditions at high altitude, but thrust was demonstrated with ionized air streams at atmospheric pressure. The idea appeared again in Hermann Oberth's Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (1929); Ways to Spaceflight), where he explained his thoughts on the mass savings of electric propulsion, predicted its use in spacecraft propulsion and attitude control, and advocated electrostatic acceleration of charged gasses.

A working ion thruster was built by Harold R. Kaufman in 1959 at the NASA Glenn Research Center facilities. It was similar to a gridded electrostatic ion thruster and used mercury for propellant. Suborbital tests were conducted during the 1960s and in 1964, and the engine was sent into a suborbital flight aboard the Space Electric Rocket Test-1 (SERT-1). It successfully operated for the planned 31 minutes before falling to Earth. This test was followed by an orbital test, SERT-2, in 1970.

On the 12 October 1964 Voskhod 1 carried out tests with ion thrusters that had been attached to the exterior of the spacecraft.

An alternate form of electric propulsion, the Hall-effect thruster, was studied independently in the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Hall-effect thrusters operated on Soviet satellites from 1972 until the late 1990s, mainly used for satellite stabilization in north–south and in east–west directions. Some 100–200 engines completed missions on Soviet and Russian satellites. Soviet thruster design was introduced to the West in 1992 after a team of electric propulsion specialists, under the support of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, visited Soviet laboratories.