Men used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric current in their space ships.

It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor repeller beam, a simple reactive thrust against an artificial mass field.

Oh, yes, I know about that, he said; reactive thrust is rotated through a fourth dimension and gets applied along the temporal rather than a spatial axis.

Then the hot gas enters the jet nozzles (De Laval nozzles), where first they are accelerated, and then expand, acquiring supersonic speed and creating reactive thrust.

Although the UNSA scientists and engineers could not be certain, many of them suspected that motion had been produced not by reactive thrust, but by an artificially induced zone of localized space-time distortion into which the vessel "fell" continuously.

It is also suggested that lift based swimmers have higher swim speeds and greater metabolic efficiency than drag based swimmers because they are able to displace greater water volumes (thus experiencing greater reactive thrust) with their wings than a comparable sized bird can with its feet.

The action of the rocket engine's combustion chambers and expansion nozzles on a high pressure fluid is able to accelerate the fluid to extremely high speed, and conversely this exerts a large reactive thrust on the rocket (an equal and opposite reaction according to Newton's third law), which propels the rocket forwards.