In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert

In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert

Every photograph of Earth ever taken from space, from Apollo 8’s Earthrise to Apollo 17’s Blue Marble to Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot, descends from a strip of 35-millimetre film pulled from the wreckage of a captured German V-2 rocket in the New Mexico desert in October 1946. The camera that exposed it was a DeVry motion-picture camera modified by Clyde Holliday at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It was not launched on a spacecraft, …