The first photo of Earth taken from outer space, October 24, 1946. U.S. Army/White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory

More than a decade before the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, scientists at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico launched a camera on top of a Nazi V-2 ballistic missile and managed to snap the first photo of Earth from space. On October 24, 1946, the rocket flew to an altitude of about 65 miles—just above the Karman line, the generally recognized border of outer space—as a 35-millimeter motion picture camera snapped a frame every second and a half. Minutes later, the whole thing came crashing back down and slammed into the ground at more than 340 mph.

When the scientists found the film intact among the wreckage of the camera, thanks to a specialized steel cassette, "they were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids," as Fred Rulli, an enlisted 19-year-old serviceman at the time who drove out to retrieve the film, told Air & Space in a 2006 article. When they projected the grainy, black-and-white pictures of the Earth onto a screen back at the launch site, "the scientists just went nuts."

It's not hard to see why. Before the White Sands photos, the highest photo ever taken was from the Explorer II balloon in 1935, 13.7 miles up, just high enough to make out the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 photo, on the other hand, clearly shows the planet against the darkness of space. This perspective prompted the engineer who built the camera, Clyde Holliday, to write in a 1950 National Geographic article that the photos are "how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship."

The V-2 research team continued to study the upper atmosphere with temperature and pressure gauges and other scientific instruments strapped to the top of some 300 railroad cars' worth of V-2 rockets at their disposal. The rockets came with multiple German scientists and engineers who were secretly brought to the United States during Operation Paperclip, including the infamous aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, credited with inventing the V-2 as well as designing the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program.

Between 1946 and 1950, hundreds of photos were taken from the tops of V-2 rockets launched from White Sands, some as high as 100 miles in altitude. A complete picture of the Earth from the perspective of outer space started to take shape for the first time, launching a new wave of geologic and meteorologic study.

Ever since, we have been fascinated and inspired by photos of our home planet taken from space. Earthrise, taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned mission to the moon, is credited with launching the environmental movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Pale Blue Dot image taken by Voyager 2 in 1990 at the request of famed astronomer Carl Sagan remains one of the most profound visualizations of our home planet's size relative to the vast Cosmos.

And we continue to value pictures of our planet today. For some of the most striking photographs of Earth ever taken from space, check out the recently released high-definition images from the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft that orbited the moon from September 2007 to June 2009.

Here's to 70 more years of photographing our home from the final frontier.

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