JON KELVEY 10.24.

2021 6:00 PM

SNAPSHOT

75 YEARS AGO, A NAZI ROCKET TOOK THE

FIRST PHOTO OF EARTH FROM SPACE
The first photo of Earth taken from space captured imaginations in 1946.

BY THE STANDARDS OF TODAY, it’s just a grainy black and white photo.

It takes a minute to make out what are smooth white cloud formations floating above the
fuzzy greyscale Earth, a swirl of monochrome set against the blackness of space.
NASA astronauts have taken more than 900,000 images from space. But 75 years ago —
before Scott Kelly was given a Nikon D4, and before the famous “Blue Marble” full view of
Earth — there was this. The very first photograph of Earth from space.

It was taken on October 24, 1946. And while the more refined images of Earth would later
eclipse it in popular memory, it was a big deal at the time.

“For 1946, it was an astounding accomplishment,” Michael Neufeld, Senior Curator in the
Department of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum, tells Inverse. “It was a
news item.”
 The first photo of Earth from space was shot on October 24, 1946. Wikimedia Commons

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How the photo was taken was a pretty big deal too: It was shot with a 35mm film camera
housed between the fuel tanks of a captured Nazi V-2 rocket launched from White Sands
Missile Range.

It was a single rocket launch from the New Mexican desert that simultaneously jump-started
the Cold War, the Space Race, and experimental space sciences.

HOW NAZI ROCKETS LED TO NASA ROCKETS

American scientists and engineers were familiar with the concept of rockets, with Robert
Goddard famously flying the world’s first liquid-fueled rockets in the 1920s.

But with the collapse of the Nazi regime at the close of World War II, the Allies discovered just
how much further the Germans had been able to take the technology with their V-2 rocket.
A captured German V-2 rocket in White Sands, New Mexico, in 1947. NASA

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“It had been a failure as a weapon because it was a very expensive way to drop a 1-ton bomb
on an enemy city,” Neufeld says. But it was also “obviously a technological breakthrough that
could herald a new age of either space vehicle or ballistic missiles,” he adds.

Naturally, the United States — and the Soviet Union — captured as many V-2s as they could
find and began studying them, flying them, and aiming to improve them.

“THE V-2 WAS ONLY THE HARBINGER OF WHAT WAS

POSSIBLE.”

National Air and Space Museum Curator Emeritus David DeVorkin tells Inverse that “the early
efforts on the American side were to first build a device that could protect us from something
like a V-2 and then build our own.”

“The V-2 was only the harbinger of what was possible,” DeVorkin says.

And so the U.S. Army — working with General Electric and the U.S. Navy supported Applied
Physics Laboratory and Naval Research Laboratory — began packing V-2s with scientific
instruments and cameras and lofting the rockets into the upper atmosphere above New
Mexico.

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It did not always go well.

“One of the big challenges was, at that point, the U.S. had no way to recover a payload,”
Neufeld says.

Developing parachutes to work with the German-made rockets would take time and money
the engineers didn’t have, so “what they did on the early V-2s is essentially put things in
armored casings and hope that it would survive being smashed into the ground at several 100
miles per hour,” Neufeld explains.

There was no rocket telemetry in the early days, and certainly no GPS beacon, so even if a
camera or instrument survived the fall, it could take a while to find the crater.

“You’d have radar tracking, which gives you an approximate location of where the impact was,
but that's it,” Neufeld says. “They'd have to send people out in Jeeps in the desert and say,
‘look for a hole roughly over there.’”

THE FIRST PHOTO OF EARTH FROM SPACE

The 12th and 13th V-2 rocket launches from White Sands were relative successes, however.

The 12th launch, on October 10, 1946, became the first space-science experiment conducted
via rocket. A solar spectrograph recorded the absorption pattern of ultraviolet light in the
upper atmosphere.

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The 13th launch, on October 24, carried the film camera rigged — using parts from a B-29
bomber’s fire control system — to take time-lapse photos from the rocket’s midsection during
its flight to an altitude of 65 miles.

The camera worked beautifully, and even managed to survive the fall, Dvorkin notes in his
book on the project. “A few hours after crashing,” he writes, “the camera was found at the
impact site ‘in almost perfect condition’ although a lens had been lost.”
 A captured German V-2 rocket launches from the White Sands Missle Range site in New Mexico. Schenectady
Museum; Hall of Electrical History Foundation/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

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Unlike later Cold War aerospace development programs, such as Chuck Yeager’s 1947 flight to
break the sound barrier, the V-2 launches were not kept secret, but widely publicized.

By November, images from the October 24 flight taken at various altitudes were released to
the press. The Los Angeles Examiner, DeVorkin writes, ran them with the headline, “You’re on
a V-2 Rocket 65 Miles Up!”

The Trans-Lux movie newsreel service called the images the “most sensational newsreel
images of all time.”
 A May 1946 launch of the V-2 rocket in New Mexico. PhotoQuest/Getty Images

The V-2 images were not the first high-altitude photographs the public had seen showing the
curvature of the Earth — those had come from the crew of the Explorer II high altitude
balloon, a mission funded by the National Geographic Society that reached an altitude of
more than 13 miles in 1935.

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But the V-2 images were taken from five times that height, and clearly showed the blackness
of space. They were taken in space from an altitude of 65 miles and struck a chord.

“Just like the Hubble images are the highlights that really excite people,” DeVorkin says, “here
you could see the Earth and you could see vast parts of the Earth.”

THE LEGACY OF V-2 ROCKET NO. 13

But it wasn’t just the popular imagination that was fired up by the V-2 images. The military
saw in them the potential for high-altitude optical reconnaissance.

One of the Naval Research Laboratory engineers working on the V-2s, Thor A. Bergstralh,
even began thinking about how useful it would be to have a rocket with a camera that didn’t
come down, DeVorkin says — a satellite.

“IT SAYS, ‘WE NOW HAVE A TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN

ACTUALLY SEND SOMETHING UP THERE.’”

The V-2 further bolstered the voices of scientists and engineers who discussed space travel in
the 1920s and 1930s, when it was assumed to be a far-future endeavor.

“The V-2 legitimizes as a lot of this,” Neufeld says. “It says, ‘we now have a technology that
can actually send something up there.’”

Meanwhile, the work of Bergstralh and other scientists and engineers, including James Van
Allen of the eponymous radiation belts, not only yielded space science discoveries but helped
develop the sort of rocket and missile guidance systems that would be necessary for both the
nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) of the Cold War and the launch vehicles of
the Space Race.
“Those were always the two sides of the rocket and still are the two sides of the rocket,”
Neufeld says. “I mean, right now we're hearing daily news on either China or North Korean
ballistic missile programs and hypersonic missile programs.”

Today as then, the twin sides of the rocket accelerate each other.

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NASA SPACE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY

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