Perhaps not as high altitude as the stratosphere, but the US was experimenting with deployment and 'landing' of fixed wing aircraft from airships in the 1930s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron
I will also +1 this as an i3wm user. I do use displayplacer and yabai together though. I have two identical external monitors that don't behave well with MacOS. Apparently the monitor's unique id's are not unique in MacOS. This causes MacOS to get them mixed up any time I disconnect from them. I have a keyboard shortcut that uses displayplacer to toggle between the two monitor valid configurations.