hah! niceeee.

RTFA: http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/09/26/1015…

Moscow: An experiment that envisaged sending a parcel from space to Earth on a 30-kilometre tether fell short of its goal yesterday when the long fibre rope did not fully unwind, Russian Mission Control said.
The YES2 experiment was prepared by almost 500 students from all over Europe and put on board the Russian Foton-M3 unmanned spacecraft, which also carried other European Space Agency experiments.
It was intended to deliver a spherical capsule, called Fotino, attached to the end of the tether back to Earth – a relatively simple and cheap technology that could be used in the future to retrieve bulkier cargoes from space.
The tether was to be deployed from the spacecraft and gradually unwound, putting the capsule into a lower orbit and swinging to provide momentum, before the re-entry capsule was released.
The capsule was to glide through the atmosphere for some 20 minutes and then a parachute was to be deployed.

Wild space launch.

RTFA: http://www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=r…

“For the first time ever, animals are now being exposed to an unmitigated space environment, with both vacuum conditions and cosmic radiation,” says the ecologist Ingemar Jönsson, a researcher at Kristianstad University in Sweden. One of the aims of sending the tiny tardigrades into space is to find out whether they can cope with the rugged conditions in space, which has previously been predicted but never tested. Tardigrades are one of the most tolerant animals on earth when it comes to dehydration and radiation, a characteristic that would be required in order to survive a trip through space. But the project is also part of research into the fundamental physiology of the tardigrade, primarily of the mechanisms that underlie their ability to withstand desiccation.

Insane, creepy, invincible bugs… into space! To colonice other planets!

RTFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether#Rotovators

The word rotovator is a portmanteau derived from the words rotor and elevator. Rotovators would be momentum exchange tethers, with a retrograde motion of the tip closest to their parent body relative to the center of the tether.
Because the tips have a significant speed (typically ~1-3 km per second), it can be possible in some cases to cancel the orbital speed such that the tips are stationary at their lowest point with respect to a planetary surface or lunar body.
On bodies with reasonably low orbital speed (such as the Moon and possibly Mars), a rotovator in low orbit can actually touch the ground, thereby providing cheap surface transport as well as launching materials into cislunar space.

Even better than space elevator: Space tether!