To elaborate a bit , to launch something from the surface of the Earth it ' s thrusttoweight ratio needs to be more than 1 . Which basically means that if your rocket engine weighs 100 kg which means it needs to overcome 100 9 . 81 about 981 N of gravity force it needs to produce more than 981 N of thrust and that ' s without taking into account the weight of rest of the rocket part of which is necessary just to produce the electricity . Also , for a practical rocket the thrust to weight ratio needs to be even more because you need to accelerate it to orbital speeds , and the more force you can output the faster you can do that . So you ' ll want at least some 150200 % of the gravity force on your rocket as thrust also depends on whether you ' re using fuel to produce electricity for your engine , as that will steadily decrease the weight of the rocket during the ascent . For a rocket with any useful amount of payload your engine would need to produce hundreds of kilonewtons of force . The EM drive that was tested by NASA has been reported to produce something in the order of micronewtons , so we need to improve it by a factor of billions before it could ever be used to launch something .