During many of the earliest American and Russian space missions, experiments were performed using cables to connect people and objects to spacecraft in orbit. These attempts generated considerable information about the formation of tethered systems and basic problems with tether orientation and gravity-gradient stabilization. During the 1970s, interest in tethered space systems (TSS) came to the forefront with an international project that involved the hanging of a probe from a low-orbit satellite to collect data on the Earth and its atmosphere. Since that time, TSS has grown to become its...