What is the maximum thrust an Ion Engine can achieve?

Could gigawatts of power or hundreds of gigawatts allow for this?

• People say plasma engine or ion engine have very low thrust do to density of the gas is so low it can only be used in space and cannot take people or cargo up into space do to very low thrust it would never take off do to very low thrust has the density of the gas too low. And builting a massive rocket would not work do to the rocket would be so big be it thousands of tons or millions of tons or more would be so big it would never take of. So my less question if there was some major breakthrough where some battery could hold gigawatts of power or hundreds of gigawatts of power than could this work?

• Answer:

  Using an ion engine to get into space is impractical even if a super battery could be made it would be uneconomic. A better approach is if sufficiently strong and light materials can be built to go the way of the space elevator, this would get the equipment etc into space relatively cheaply, in a microgravity environment the low thrust of an ion engine won't be a problem, it just means low acceleration but very high speeds can be attained this way. The New Horizons space probe on its way to pluto (ETA 2015 I think) is using ion thrusters. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html