14 DAY TRIAL // In the hope that he would prove that a space mail delivery system was viable through his method, a student built, in collaboration with the ESA, an experimental satellite, that broke the record for being the longest man made structure ever to be flown into space. However, it seems that in the process of returning the package back to the surface of the Earth, it mysteriously disappeared.
The Fotino, as the small capsule has been named, was flown into space with the help of a Russian Foton-M3 spacecraft, which released it into space while unwinding more than 30 kilometers of restrain, made out of a super-strong material, less than 0.5 millimeters in diameter. However, the demonstration abruptly ended, when the spacecraft suffered telemetry failure, during the moment when the capsule was being dropped in the Earth's atmosphere. Being unable to control the descent speed and not knowing exactly how much of the restrain had been unwinded from the reel, the computer on board the Foton-M3 spacecraft decided to free the Fotino capsule, thus cutting the restrain.
As of that moment the Fotino capsule has been lost.
Remnant data recovered from the Russian spacecraft revealed that, in fact, the reel unwinding process actually accelerated during the time when the Foton spacecraft lost the telemetry instruments, opposing to what scientists first thought, as the whole length of the restrain was deployed. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network confirmed that the Fotino capsule was released into Earth's atmosphere, as the Foton spacecraft gained more than 1.6 kilometers of height in its orbit, after the moment when it had released the capsule.
However, the fact that it has not been found, yet, suggests that it might have followed a much lower orbit during Earth's atmosphere re-entry, or it might have completely been burned by the heat generated during its descent.
Even though they haven't been successful in recovering the object sent in space by them, the team which conducted the experiment say that the restrain system works, and future packages might be sent, this way, back to the Earth's surface. The same procedure might be used to correct altered trajectories of satellites in their way towards other planets.