First picture from space

  
First photograph of the Earth taken from an altitude of 65 miles (105 kilometers). Credit: White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory
 
The first pictures of Earth as seen from space were taken from a camera on V-2 No. 13 rocket on October 24, 1946. The grainy, black-and-white photos were taken from an altitude of 65 miles (104.6 kilometers) by a 35-millimeter DeVry motion picture camera riding on a captured V-2 missile (Upper Air Rocket Number 13) launched from the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR).

   Rocket V-2 No.13 was assembled and launched by General Electric company with both captured German components and re-manufactured ones. Pictures were taken every second and a half. The rocket fell back to Earth and ploughed into the ground, smashing the camera, but the film was safe inside its steel cassette. Before 1946, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which had ascended 13.7 miles (22 kilometers) in 1935, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 cameras reached more than five times that altitude, where they clearly showed the planet set against the blackness of space. 
 
   When the movie frames were stitched together, Clyde T. Holliday (d. 1982) of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950, the V-2 photos showed for the first time "how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship." He also predicted that one day “the entire land area of the globe might be mapped in this way”.
  
A V-2 rocket just after launch at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Credit: NASA
 
Clyde T. Holliday, of the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, inspecting two of the cameras used in the rocket filming sequence. Camera at left was used in the V-2 and the one on the right was used in the Aerobee. Credit: JHU-APL. 1948

   German V-2 rockets captured by the United States Army at the end of World War II were used as sounding rockets to carry scientific instruments into the Earth's upper atmosphere at White Sands Missile Range for a program of atmospheric and solar investigation from 1946 to 1952. Rocket trajectory was intended to carry the rocket about 100 miles (160 km) high and 30 miles (48 km) horizontally from WSMR Launch Complex 33. Impact velocity of returning rockets was reduced by inducing structural failure of the rocket airframe upon atmospheric re-entry. More durable recordings and instruments might be recovered from the rockets after ground impact, but telemetry was developed to transmit and record instrument readings during flight. 
 
   More than 1,000 Earth pictures were returned from V-2s between 1946 and 1950, from altitudes as high as 100 miles. The photos, showing huge expanses of the American southwest, appeared in newspapers and were scrutinized by scientists from the U.S. Weather Bureau.
 
 Universal newsreel about a V-2 rocket taking pictures of Earth in 1946. Credit: Universal Studios
 

References:

Tony Reichhardt: Smithsonian Magazine. The First Photo From Space.

 

© 2025, Andrew Mirecki 

 

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