“…The importance of this topic stems from the role that threads, tethers, ropes, chains and other string-like elements play in a wide range of industrial applications. During most of the twentieth century, these elements were commonly used in light and marine industry and in instrument engineering [3,18,25,28,42,43,54,61]. Later, in the second half of the twentieth century, it became understood that tethers can be also useful in space applications [4,7,9,10,14,17,37,[44][45][46]50].…”