From http://www.spacedaily.com/news/physics-04w.html

There is another propulsion application for quantum entanglement which, while probably requiring more R&D investment than the teleportation drive, would have even greater (as in, several orders of magnitude greater) speed benefits for a spacecraft: applying quantum entanglement to produce the first viable photon drive.

A photon drive system uses nothing but a beam of photons (a beam of light if the photons fall in the frequency spectrum of visible light) to propel a spacecraft.

The photon drive is a theoretical possibility that has been talked about for decades but has never been practical due to the immense power requirements it would take for such a drive to generate sufficient thrust to propel a spacecraft.

An example of the simplest photon drive imaginable has been given in the past: if a flashlight were to be turned on in space and left there by an astronaut, its light beam would provide a miniscule amount of thrust to the flashlight, but not nearly enough to accelerate it to any noteworthy speed before the battery burned out.

A photon drive requires essentially no fuel, only power. In other words, a photon drive has an extremely high specific impulse but a very low thrust-to-weight ratio.

The great advantage to a photon drive is that if its power requirements were to be overcome, a photon drive system could eventually accelerate a spacecraft up to very high speeds-even, theoretically, close to the speed of light.

However, both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion fall short in terms of generating the necessary power, at least from a reactor small enough to be realistically carried onboard a spacecraft.

A matter-antimatter reaction of a sufficient size could generate the required power, but antimatter is exquisitely expensive to produce at the time of this writing, and containment and manipulation technologies for it are still in early stages of development.

Thus, a photon drive powered by matter-antimatter reaction is currently not a viable option. There is another option.

Applying quantum teleportation to a photon drive (to produce what I am dubbing the telephotonic drive) would remove the one great engineering obstacle (i.e., power generation) to producing a viable photon drive system.

Recall from earlier in this article that laser beams (i.e., concentrated streams of photons) have been successfully teleported. Without knowing it, the researchers who accomplished this feat created a basic telephotonic drive in the course of their experiments.

In the case of a telephotonic drive powerful enough to propel a spacecraft, earthbound electric plants (nuclear or otherwise) would generate the power for a laser beam which would then be teleported to a spacecraft.

While even a dedicated nuclear power plant may not generate sufficient power to create a laser powerful enough to realistically provide propulsion for a spacecraft, there is no reason why a single spacecraft would need to be powered by a single entangled laser beam.

Multiple power plants, perhaps widely spread geographically over the earth's surface, could generate multiple laser beams which would then be teleported to adjacent "cells" to the rear of the spacecraft, producing an array of high-power laser beams that would collectively propel the craft..potentially to near the speed of light.

Incidentally, since entanglement information is itself conveyed (either by laser or radio waves) at the speed of light, and since even a telephotonic drive could never, according to relativity theory, propel a craft up to the speed of light, a spacecraft propelled by a telephotonic drive could never "outrun" its lasers' required entanglement information.

A variation on the telephotonic drive concept involves using entangled lasers, generated on the earth's surface, to create a laser fusion drive.

The idea behind the laser fusion drive (which, like the photon drive, has been talked about for years but has never been developed) is that pellets of frozen hydrogen fired out of the rear of a spacecraft like a machine gun are individually struck by powerful laser beams, igniting each one in an individual fusion reaction; the resulting series of energy bursts push the craft forward.

There is an engineering obstacle in creating lasers powerful enough to fuse the hydrogen pellets; as in the case of the telephotonic drive, teleporting entangled laser beams from earthbound power plants to the spacecraft would overcome this obstacle.

While an entangled laser fusion drive would not accelerate a spacecraft to the speeds attainable by a telephotonic drive, or even a teleportation drive, I suspect that it is more immediately realizable from a practical engineering standpoint than either of those propulsion concepts.

The first step, of course, towards implementing any of these drive schemes is to test them on the ground. As stated before, the theory of the telephotonic drive has, in effect, already been proven; it only needs scaling up (though vastly so) in order to become a viable propulsion method.

The successful entanglement of lasers also proves the conceptual soundness of the entangled laser fusion drive. The teleportation drive could be proven, in concept, for relatively little cost or resources.

There are commercially available small ion rockets designed for use as maneuvering thrusters on satellites and space probes.

An experiment to prove the theoretical soundness of the teleportation drive would involve taking one of these commercial thrusters and entangling its fuel to another specimen of the same element.

If, upon activation of the thruster, the entangled second specimen generated an ion stream, the theory would be proven. Such an experiment is well within the resources of even small government or university physics laboratories.

Spacecraft propulsion is therefore a third practical application of quantum teleportation, in addition to quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

There is, however, a fourth application, one which deserves its own treatment in a separate paper but which I will briefly introduce here because of its relevance to the propulsion systems outlined above. That application is wireless power transmission.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy have, over the last three decades, studied various concepts for generating electric power in space and then beaming it (via microwave in most design concepts) to the earth's surface for public use.

In the late 1970s the DoE, under the Carter Administration, studied the possibility of orbiting large satellites that would collect solar energy and beam it to earth.

The idea was unviable due to the immense size of the solar arrays involved (on the order of tens of square kilometers). There is also a problem presented by beaming energy to earth in this manner, as such a beam would have a tendency to diffract in the earth's atmosphere.

However, aided by advances in solar cell technology, much smaller solar arrays could today be placed in orbit around the sun, perhaps within the orbit of Mercury (naturally the arrays would need to be designed to withstand intensive bombardment by heat and radiation; the upside would be that the proximity to the sun would also allow for greater power collection).

A resulting microwave beam generated with the energy collected could be quantum-teleported directly to the earth's surface. Aside from the obvious immediate benefits of such an efficient power generation system, these satellites could also provide the power input for a telephotonic or entangled laser fusion drive.

Thus quantum teleportation could provide an "end-to-end solution" for propelling a craft up to near-light speeds.

Einstein was uncomfortable with the idea of quantum entanglement, referring to it as "spooky action at a distance". By applying quantum teleportation to deep-space propulsion, that element of distance may be measurable in light-years.