Story Highlights
- historical event:
- The V-2 rocket which took a photo of Earth from space was launched by the Americans, who had captured a large number of such rockets and their corresponding equipment from the Third Reich.
On this day in 1946, the first photos of Earth were taken from space. It is very interesting that this was done using V-2 rockets which were designed in the time of Nazi Germany. Namely, Hitler’s Third Reich had a rocket program led by the famous scientist Wenher von Braun (who later became a NASA director).
The V-2 rocket which took the photos was launched by the Americans, who had captured a large number of such rockets and their corresponding equipment from the Third Reich (the numbers were truly huge, measuring hundreds of railroad cars). The V-2 rockets were taken from Europe to the U.S., mostly to the state of New Mexico, where further tests were conducted at White Sands (this is still the largest military installation in the USA, and is the location where the first nuclear bomb of the Manhattan project was tested). The so-called Roswell Incident also occurred near White Sands, in 1947.
The photographic equipment mounted on the V-2 rocket launched from New Mexico on this day could take one photo every 1.5 seconds. The rocket could reach a maximum altitude of 105 km (100 km is usually considered the border of the atmosphere and space). These photos were thus revolutionary because the maximum altitude from which previous photos had been taken was only 22 km (these were taken from a balloon in 1935).
