NASA-Langley film from1963 showing a 1/12 scale Saturn I model dropped from a helicopter, using a Rogallo wing for recovery. Considerable work went into using this system for S-IB recovery, landing on a runway for refurbishment and reflight. The booster would land horizontally on four skids. There’s a good chance it would not have worked, or would have reliably resulted in damaged boosters, but if they’d stuck with it we could have had recoverable boosters generations earlier.
