How can electrostatic forces provide lift to the gossamer spider? I was reading this article entitled "“Ballooning” Spiders Use Electrostatic Forces To Generate Lift". What I would like to know is how can a electrostatically charged object generate lift within the atmosphere? 
If I have a charged piece of paper or silk, I don't notice that it can lift off my hand and fly up 100's of meters, yet a spider can do so to the hight of 4 kilometres according to the article. Clearly my silk or paper is much heavier, but therefore, shouldn't I be able to construct a suitably charged object which could do the same as the spider up, lift up to 4 kilometers? If we assume that spider is using electrostatic charges solely as the means of lift, how can it work? How could we develop a model which can do the same thing?
 A: Since this came up to first page again, here are some quotes of the paper that explains the phenomenon of lifting spiders.

First, some background about electrostatics in the atmosphere. Meteorologists are well acquainted with the huge charges and electric fields that build up in the atmosphere. “This field exists globally in the atmosphere with an average surface magnitude of 120 Volts per metre pointing downward,” says Gorham.
He then goes on to calculate the charge that a strand must have to lift a spider of a certain weight. This turns out to range from 10 to 30 nanoCoulombs.
Is it possible for spider silk to become charged in this way? Gorham shows that it is entirely reasonable. He points out that the silk contains significant amounts of charge bearing molecules such as amino acids and that it becomes negatively charged when in frictional contact with other materials.
That should allow the silk to become charged as it leaves the spinnerets, a process known as flow electrification. Indeed, this kind of charging is well known in the petrochemical industry where it can produce high voltage discharges (although Gorham says it has not yet been studied in spider silk).
There must be a source for this charge, of course. Gorham thinks a likely origin is the Earth itself which has a negative charge density of about 6 nanoCoulombs per square metre on average. That’s more than enough to give the silk a healthy boost and spiders may well be able to pick out prominences where the charge density is much higher.



Of course, Gorham’s ideas will need to be tested by actually measuring the charge on gossamer spider silk as it is generated. That’s an experiment for an enterprising biologist to take on.

It is a hypothesis that has to be confirmed experimentally, but cannot be ruled out outright as contradicting  other observations.
