First photograph of Earth from space marks 80th anniversary

The first photograph of Earth from space was captured on October 24, 1946, using a captured German V-2 rocket (designated V-2 No. 13). The rocket was launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA, reaching an apogee of approximately 105 kilometers, which is just above the Kármán line.

A 35mm black-and-white DeVry motion picture camera, prepared by engineer Clyde Holliday of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was mounted on the rocket to take frames at roughly 1.5-second intervals. While the camera was destroyed when the rocket crashed upon reentry at speeds of approximately 150 m/s, the film survived inside a specialized steel cassette.

The resulting images provided humanity with its first view of the planet's curvature against the blackness of space, along with clouds over the southwestern United States. Although the image quality was low, the mission was a milestone in space research, occurring during a period between 1946 and 1950 when over a thousand similar photographs were obtained through subsequent V-2 flights.