Vladimir Syromiatnikov's bold attempts to light up Siberia with a space mirror captured global attention. The BBC's Tomorrow's World reported on an ambitious experiment that was launched on 4 February 1993.

It sounds like a scheme a James Bond villain might hatch: launching a giant mirror into orbit to harness the Sun's rays, then redirecting them to beam down on a target on Earth. Yet this was exactly what the Russian space agency Roscosmos attempted to do on 4 February 1993.

But the aim of the Znamya (meaning banner in Russian) project was not a dastardly plot to hold the world to ransom. Its more utopian goal, as presenter Kate Bellingham explained on BBC Tomorrow's World before Znamya's launch, was "to light up Arctic cities in Siberia during the dark winter months". Essentially, it would try to switch the Sun back on again for Russia's polar regions after night fell.

Even today this seems a novel concept, yet the idea of using mirrors in space to reflect light onto the Earth's surface was not actually a new one. Back in 1923, German rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth had proposed it in The Rocket into Planetary Space. His self-published book – based on a PhD thesis which Heidelberg University had rejected for seeming too implausible – demonstrated mathematically how a rocket could leave the Earth's orbit. Among the other ideas covered in the publication were the potential effects on the human body of space travel, how satellites could be launched into orbit, and, crucially, the concept of creating a grid of colossal adjustable concave mirrors that could be used to reflect sunlight onto a concentrated point on the Earth. Oberth reasoned that this illumination could help avert disasters – like the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 – or assist with the rescue of their survivors. Oberth also speculated that space mirrors could be used to clear shipping lanes by melting icebergs or even to manipulate the Earth's weather patterns.

This space mirror idea was taken up again by German physicists during World War Two. At the Nazi weapons research centre in Hillersleben, scientists worked on a design to build a terrifying reflective orbiting weapon called the Sonnengewehr or Sun gun in German. In 1945, Time magazine reported that captured German scientists had told US Army interrogators that the Sonnengewehr was meant to act as a death ray, refocusing light from the Sun to set fire to cities or boil away water in lakes. Despite facing evident scepticism from their US interrogators as they handed over their technical drawings, the German scientists had believed that their Sun gun could be operational in 50 years, the chief of Allied technical intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel John Keck, told reporters at the time.

In the 1970s, another German‐born rocket engineer, Dr Krafft Ehricke, again began looking at the concept. Ehricke had been a member of Germany's V-2 rocket team during World War Two. At the end of the war, he surrendered to the US and was recruited as part of Operation Paperclip, wherein 1,600 scientists, engineers and technicians deemed to be valuable were shielded from prosecution, spirited out of Germany, and allowed to continue their work in the US.

Ehricke became part of the US space programme, and in the 1970s he returned to the idea of building a mirror in space. In 1978, he wrote a paper detailing how giant orbiting mirrors could illuminate the night sky, enabling farmers to plant or harvest 24 hours a day, or could be used to deflect sunlight down onto solar panels on Earth to be converted into electricity on demand. He called this idea Power Soletta. Ehricke, a space-travel enthusiast from childhood and a long-time proponent of colonising other planets, died in 1984 without seeing Power Soletta come to fruition. But he would get his long-desired space flight posthumously when his cremated remains were launched into Earth's orbit in 1997 along with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and 1960s counterculture psychologist Timothy Leary.

Throughout the 1980s, Nasa looked repeatedly at the concept of generating solar power by harnessing sunlight with an orbiting mirror system called Solares, but despite government interest the project was never able to secure funding. However, in Russia the idea of solar mirrors took root.

At the time, a Russian scientist called Vladimir Syromiatnikov was investigating whether large reflective solar sails could be attached to a spaceship. Syromiatnikov was a pioneering figure in space engineering breakthroughs. He had worked on the Vostok rocket, the world's first crewed spacecraft that took Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961. He also developed an ingenious spacecraft docking mechanism, the Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System (APAS). This was used in July 1975 in the Apollo-Soyuz test project,

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