The First Photo of Earth Taken from Space

Some photographs of planet Earth automatically went down in history. Earthrise from the Apollo 8 mission was etched into our minds, and something similar happened with Pale Blue Dot, amplified by the words of the eternal Carl Sagan. However, those photos of Earth were not the first to be taken from space. That privilege belongs to an old black-and-white image, recorded on October 24, 1946, with a camera aboard a modified German V-2 rocket.

A frequently repeated idea is that if aliens were able to see anything about humanity, the first thing would be Adolf Hitler at the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games. SETI experts have said more than once that despite the high frequency of the original signal (which would allow it to penetrate the ionosphere), it is virtually impossible for a civilization to detect it due to its low power and the lack of a directional antenna.

Even so, Nazi technology found a way to write several chapters in the history of space exploration, and one of the first takes us back to 1946... October 24 to be precise. A date that precedes the creation of NASA, the launch of Sputnik, and even the Roswell incident. That day, a V-2 rocket extracted from European territory lifted off from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, crossed the Kármán line, reached an altitude of 105 kilometers, and captured this:

The First Photo of Earth from Space

That shot is nothing less than the first photograph of Earth from space. Previous photographs taken from high-altitude balloons did not exceed 22 kilometers, but the sheer power of the V-2 broke all records. Replacing its traditional warhead, scientists installed a series of specialized instruments, among which stood out a 35-millimeter camera programmed to fire every 1.5 seconds. Apparently the camera did not survive the return trip, but the film did, with the help of a reinforced steel jar.

This was just one of the multiple experiments that the United States carried out with V-2 rockets (not forgetting the participation of transferred German scientists). In fact, White Sands hosted 67 V-2 launches between 1946 and 1951, out of a total of 100 captured rockets. Almost 11 years after that notable photo, Sputnik would deprive millions of Americans of sleep, formally starting the Space Race.

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