About 1999
All started with a little plywood dinghy, Frank Ellinghaus built (and sailed) in USA. While looking for boat and rigging designs he stumbled onto a Newsgroup where he found out, that sailing was not only possible on earth but also in space by using the solar radiation pressure to propel a spacecraft. A solar sail spacecraft would need no fuel at all for operation. This thought fascinated him and he looked for solar sail designs and came onto some patent applications for solar sails.
What he saw, where something like kite designs or square sailcraft with poles>/masts with little potential to manipulate those spacecraft. A solar sail spacecraft with additional thruster propulsion should it be. So he came up with his solar-thruster-sailor-design of a large solar sail spacecraft with a stiff Outer Ring which allowed to fix double thruster units (DTU) to it's rim to provide a good lever for turning the (large in the spuare km range) solar sailcraft.
That solar sail would also feature "Roller Reefing" whereby the sail was fixed onto rolls which could furl those foils in or outwards.
This would allow to assemble large structures in space and also finetuning the directions and power onto those sail foils through the solar radiation pressure. He also aquired some German patents on this designs. But for space structures that large, having them mounted in space, would be pretty expensive and the chances, that they would get built are unlikely, even in our times.
2019
Two fotos of the aluminum model shown on the International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS2019) in Aachen/Germany. It has a diameter of 180 cm.
