Lightcraft

The beam is reflected and focuses to heat the air at an extremely high temperature up to 30,000 degrees, transforming it in a plasma that violently expands, pushing the craft forward.

The air becomes ionized in these places, allowing MHD interaction of Lorentz forces to actively control the airflow around a discoidal shape that otherwise (i.e. passively) has very bad aerodynamical properties due to its largest surface, a flat plate, being perpendicular to the flow.

[14] Finally, a laser or some part of the microwaves are also focused as a plasma torch at some distance above the Lightcraft, creating an aerospike that detaches and mitigates the bow shock wave ahead of the craft when it evolves at supersonic speeds, lowering heat transfert to the walls.

The distance and intensity of the aerospike are tuned according to the atmospheric pressure, temperature gradients and velocity of the airflow to actively shape the shock wave so the boundary layer can be optimally controlled by the radial MHD slipstream accelerators.

[18] In 2008, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information of the US Department of Energy published an article on the official website in which its author William Larson[19] talks about successfully completed research in this area.

[20] After Leik Myrabo's retirement from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2011, the homepage of his private company Lightcraft Technologies, Inc. (LTI) disappeared with a temporary notification explaining that a "site renovation" was ongoing.