On 24 October 1946, a V-2 rocket launched from White Sands in New Mexico carried a 35 mm camera above the atmosphere and took the first photograph of the Earth from space. The rocket reached an altitude of about 105 kilometres, well above what is now called the Kármán line but far below orbital altitude, and the camera, mounted in the nose, took a frame every second and a half through a small porthole. The film was in a cassette designed to survive the crash landing, and it did.
The V-2 was German. Around 300 of them had been shipped to the United States after the war, along with parts and documentation, and the American programme used them for high-altitude research in physics, biology and astronomy while the army and the universities worked out what to do with the technology. The launch on 24 October was part of a series run by the Applied Physics Laboratory and by the Naval Research Laboratory.
The scientists were interested in solar ultraviolet radiation, cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere, and the camera was there partly for public relations and partly to record what the rocket saw. Clyde Holliday, an engineer at the Applied Physics Laboratory, had designed the camera system, and the pictures taken from successive flights showed increasingly large areas of New Mexico, Texas and Mexico, and eventually the curvature of the Earth.
The images mattered for reasons that were not scientific. A photograph of the Earth as an object in space, with a visible edge and an atmosphere above it, had not existed before, and it became one of the sources of the way the planet came to be understood in the following decades, culminating in the images taken from lunar distance in 1966 and 1968 and in the Blue Marble photograph of 1972. The V-2 flight lasted minutes. The picture it took has been reproduced ever since, and it was taken by a weapon designed to destroy cities.
The rocket was German. The film survived.