Thirty two years ago, on this day, February 5th, 1993,
If you happened to be looking at the sky in Europe on a cold night on February 5 1993, there is a chance you could have seen a dim flash of light. That flash came from a Russian space mirror experiment called Znamya-2. Znamya-2 was a 20-metre reflective structure much like aluminium foil (Znamya means “banner” in Russian), unfurled from a spacecraft which had just undocked from the Russian Mir space station. Its goal was to demonstrate solar energy could be reflected from space to Earth. https://theconversation.com/reflectors-in-space-could-make-solar-farms-on-earth-work-for-longer-every-day-220554#:~:text=Each%20time%20a%20reflector%20passes,its%20hours%20of%20electricity%20generation.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there had been various proposals about using space based satellites to capture the enormous amounts of the sun’s energy and redirect it to specific points on Earth, space based mirrors, etc, not as weapons for that too, but for limitless, reliable energy generation and space based energy satellites are a fascinating thing.
See also the novels The Dynostar Menace (1975) and also Quatermass by Nigel Kneale that came out in 1979 [interesting looking podcast here] and the Children of the Pylons.”
What I think we can learn from this We dream of limitless “free” energy, but there are some upfront charges
What happened next
Ripped from last month’s headlines…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.