1st photo of Earth from space
On October 24, 1946, scientists launched a V-2 rocket — carrying a 35-mm motion picture camera — to a height 65 miles (105 km) above a New Mexico desert. After a few minutes, the camera dropped back to Earth and was destroyed on impact. But the film survived.
Today, the Kármán line is the widely recognized boundary that marks the edge of space. It’s located at 62 miles (100 km) above Earth’s surface, roughly where Earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin to support traditional aerodynamic flight. According to the Orbital Radar 2025 Launch Database, we’re currently launching into space at a rate of about a launch per day (6-7 launches per week).
But the 1946 first photo of Earth was nothing short of a revelation.
Reliving the momentous day
Air & Space Magazine tells the story of this major event in space history:
Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second [152 meters/second]. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.
Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalls, ‘They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids.’ Later, back at the launch site, ‘when they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts.’
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 km] 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 Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950 that 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.’
Another early image from space
See a panorama of Earth from 1948 here
See videos and read the rest of the story from Air & Space.
Bottom line: On October 24, 1946, a movie camera on board a V-2 rocket captured the first photo of Earth from outer space. We’ve come a long way since then!
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The post 1st photo of Earth from space, 80 years ago first appeared on EarthSky.