Catching A Rocket With The World’s Biggest Helicopter - Hillers Air Tug

Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe today! 3d Model here: A giant helicopter, with a rotor diameter bigger than the length of a football field. It would be capable not only of transporting a Saturn five S-1C first stage to the launch site - but of actually catching it in midair as it fell on a parachute - ready to be reused. This is one of the biggest mind boggoling space concepts that was never built - developing a reusable rocket technology - but in the 60s. Today on our new space channel, we will be covering one of my favorite, yet unkown, insane plans, an aircraft built to play catch with a moon rocket - the Hillers Air Tug. It was monstrous huge, with a rotor diameter over 400 feet, or 120 meters for our European friends. These rotors would have jet engines on the tips, that would allow the rotors to make one rotation per second - which is very fast for something so dam wide - but i’ll get to the physics problem