Seeing Earth for the First Time
On October 24, 1946, a group of American military engineers and scientists did a very strange thing: they used a Nazi V2 rocket to take the first picture of the Earth from space. It was a strange but perhaps fitting time to find this kind of perspective—World War II was barely over, NASA did not yet exist, and Sputnik wouldn’t be launched for another 11 years. The only people who had seriously given thought to spaceships were the Nazis, who developed the V2 rocket bombs that wreaked havoc in London and Antwerp towards the end of WWII.
When the Allies captured Nazi factory and launch sites, America seized some of these V2s and took some to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where they were launched into space for testing. Clyde Holliday, an engineer there, understood that images would be a powerful tool for space exploration, so he developed a 35mm camera that could take a photo every 1.5 seconds, and sent it up with a V2. Before this, the highest pictures ever taken were by the Explorer II, a balloon that reached 22 kilometres high in 1935, but Holliday’s V2 rocket climbed to an altitude over 100 kilometres. It snapped photos every 1.5 seconds, then fell back down and slammed into the Earth, destroying the camera—but luckily a steel cassette protected the film.
The image seen above is the first image the camera took: the grainy grey Earth against the vast blackness of space. Later images stitched together in a panorama can be seen here. National Geographic released these photos in 1950, giving the world our first real glimpse of how small we are, and how high we can reach. (via sciencesoup)
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