as a nearly perfectly uninformed occasional consumer of space-related articles, I can say it makes a lot of sense (to me) why we'd use something like that to move things around the solar system.
I got my youngest a ZipString Aracna for Christmas (entirely driven by a tiny cameo in the film Weapons). It is rare that a toy for kids feels magical, but it's been a real hit over the holidays.
A related idea is to improve the efficiency of a trebuchet by stringing heavy weighted nodes along the sling line. The biggest one built so far used one 50 pound node on the sling line to launch an 8 pound pumpkin 1500 feet, but the math says it keeps working better as you add more nodes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ruiMZYTc5HE
