First Pictures: The View of Earth from Space – October 24, 1946

Today we take for granted that we can instantly access images of almost any part of the Earth taken from space using a growing array of satellites. These images, in addition to supplying information for numerous practical applications ranging from weather to intelligence gathering to the assessment of Earth resources, also provide the general public with inspiring views our home planet from a unique vantage point. But such images did not exist before the advent of space travel.

A color image of the Earth taken by NASA’s DSCOVR satellite on October 24, 2021 from a range of 1.53 million kilometers. (NASA/GSFC)

Getting a View from Space

Before World War II, the greatest altitude from which the Earth had been photographed was a mere 22 kilometers – well short of the 100-kilometer Karman line generally accepted today as the threshold of space. These photographs were taken by a pair of aeronauts, US Army Air Corps Captains Albert W. Stevens and Orvil A. Anderson, on November 11, 1935 from inside the pressurized gondola of the Explorer II high altitude balloon. Sponsored by the National Geographic Society working with the US Army Air Corps (the predecessor of today’s US Air Force), these photographs clearly showed the curvature of the Earth and the atmosphere as a thin blue band giving us a foretaste of how the Earth would appear from space.

An annotated photograph of the Earth taken from the Explorer II high altitude balloon on November 11, 1935. Click on image to enlarge. (National Geographic/US Army Air Corps)

The ability to reach the threshold of space was made possible by the advances in rocket technology during World War II. The ultimate product of these wartime efforts, in terms of size and range, was the German A-4 rocket (better known as the V-2) developed by a team led by aerospace pioneer, Werhner von Braun. Designed to hurl a one-ton payload of high explosives over a range of 320 kilometers, the 12.5 metric ton V-2 was by far the largest rocket ever developed up until this time and the first capable of flying into space. Following the surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, the western Allies and the Soviet Union scrambled to secure advanced German technology and the people who developed it to bolster their own military capabilities. During one of these efforts, known as Operation Paperclip, the US Army was able to get 300 railcar loads of V-2 rockets and components as well as von Braun and many key members of his team and bring them back to the US. While the immediate goal of these efforts was for weapon development, the launch of “surplus” V-2 rockets from American soil, starting in April 1946 from the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, also opened the opportunity for scientific investigation of the near-space environment for the first time.

A cutaway view of the German A-4 rocket (better known as the V-2) developed in Germany by a team led by Wernher von Braun. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA/MSFC)

In order to make the best use of the V-2 rockets for scientific research, a joint US Army-USAF-US Navy committee (which included participation by various laboratories and universities) called the V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel was established in February 1946. The research agencies responsible for the Upper Atmosphere Research Program were General Electric Co. (which also provided the engineering support for the V-2 launches), the USAF Air Materiel Command, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Princeton University and the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Founded in 1942 during World War II under the Office of Scientific Research and Development’s Section T as part of the Federal government’s effort to mobilize the nation’s science and engineering expertise within its universities, APL was a non-profit research center affiliated with Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

V-2 #2 shown being prepared for launch on April 16, 1946. (White Sands Missile Range Museum)

APL flew its first payload, a lead-shielded Geiger tube mounted in the nosecone to detect cosmic radiation, on V-2 #2 launched on April 16, 1946 but, it failed to record any data when it reached an altitude of only four kilometers due to a rocket malfunction. APL’s second flight opportunity, V-2 #3 launched on May 10 carrying an expanded suite of radiation detectors, was more successful reaching a peak altitude of 113 kilometers. Unfortunately, none of the instruments were recovered from the wreckage of the V-2. In order to increase the chances of recovering data from the impact-hardened instruments in the future, explosive charges would be detonated during the final descent to separate the instrument-laden warhead from the rocket body. This technique worked on the third flight to carry APL instruments, V-2 #9 launched on July 30, but the warhead and its payload of instruments could not be located following its flight to a peak altitude of 167 kilometers.

Getting Pictures from the V-2

Early on in the V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Program, there was a need to secure photographs from the V-2 during its flight, not so much to study the Earth as to determine the attitude of the rocket itself. Unlike later sounding rockets or their payloads which provided active attitude control to point instruments during ballistic flight, the V-2 used fins and graphite vanes in the exhaust plume of its main engine to steer itself. As a result, the V-2 tended to roll and tumble uncontrollably once the engine shutdown and the rocket moved above the sensible atmosphere where its fins were rendered useless.

To address the attitude knowledge issue, the NRL team decided to mount a US Navy K-25 automatic large-format camera on some of the early NRL-sponsored tests which pointed through a right-angle prism to provide a series of views of one of the V-2’s fins during flight. The first flight with this camera, V-2 #12 launched on October 10, 1946, reached a peak altitude of 164 kilometers but produced severely vignetted and blurred photographs with a limited view of the Earth below.

The launch of V-2 #12 on October 10, 1946 carrying an NRL-sponsored camera. Unfortunately the images were too blurred and vignetted to provide a useful view of the Earth. (White Sands Missile Range Museum)

An aerial photography specialist who had worked at APL during World War II, Clyde T. Holliday, proposed to acquire images from the V-2 with the main objective of assessing their use in meteorology and long-range reconnaissance. Holliday, working with J. Allen Hynek, used a commercially available DeVry 35mm motion picture camera in their initial attempt to secure photographs of the Earth from a V-2 rocket. This camera was selected because it had proven to be flightworthy and could be automated using readily available parts from a B-29 gun director system. The camera, which was encased in a steel box mounted in the mid-section of the V-2 between its propellant tanks, was modified to acquire images at a rate of three frames per second – 1/8^th the rate of a normal motion picture camera providing a time lapse view of the flight. With its exposed film safely housed in an armored drum, the camera would be ejected during descent at the same time explosive charges would separate the instrument-laden nosecone.

APL’s Clyde T. Holliday shown around October 1948 working with cameras to be flown on the V-2. (JHU/APL)

The first attempt to acquire photographs of the Earth from an APL-sponsored V-2 flight came on October 24, 1946. V-2 #13, with a launch mass of 12,826 kilograms, carried a pair of Geiger counters in the warhead section as well as a solar ultraviolet spectrograph and a device to emit puffs of smoke during ascent to study high-altitude atmospheric winds in addition to the Holliday’s camera. Liftoff took place at 12:15 PM MST from White Sands with the V-2’s engine burning until propellant depletion 59.8 seconds after launch. At this point, V-2 #13 was at an altitude of 27 kilometers travelling 1,216 meters per second. The rocket continued to ascend until it reached a peak altitude of 105 kilometers three minutes after launch. The nosecone and Holliday’s camera were ejected at an altitude of 9.2 kilometers before the spent V-2 #13 impacted in the desert at an estimated speed of 150 meters per second some 27.4 kilometers downrange from the launch site.

Here is a still from the movie taken during the flight of V-2 #13 launched on October 24, 1946. Taken from an altitude of 104 kilometers, it is said to cover an area of 2.8 million square kilometers of the American southwest. Click on image to enlarge. (US Army/WSMR/APL)

Within a few hours of the end of the flight, Holliday’s camera was located in the desert in good shape save for its missing lens. The DeVry camera worked as intended providing a time lapse record of the flight of V-2 #13. Despite the rocket going into a tumble following engine cutoff, excellent quality views of the Earth below had been secured. In November, APL issued a press release with selected stills of the Earth from Holliday’s movie taken at altitudes of 48, 72 and 104 kilometers. In the days and weeks ahead, hundreds of newspapers and magazines carried the images and hailed the success of the first views of the Earth from the edge of space. Afterwards, Holliday continued to refine his techniques and used improved cameras to provide us with our first views of the Earth as it might be viewed by future space travelers.

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General References

David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences After World War II, Springer-Verlag, 1992

Lorence W. Fraser, “High Altitude Research at the Applied Physics Laboratory in the 1940s”, Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest, Vol 6., No. 1, January-March 1985

L.D. White, Final Report – Project Hermes V-2 Missile Program, General Electric, September 1952