76 years ago, the first views of Earth from Space were delivered from a captured V-2 rocket

While it may not look like much compared to the live views transmitted back from SpaceX and other launch vehicles today, these grainy black and white images are the first images captured from space.

An off-the-shelf DeVry "lunchbox" 35mm camera mounted on a captured Nazi rocket recorded at 4 frames per second on standard Kodak motion picture film stock. The camera and its protective enclosure were ejected at 25,000 feet to free-fell to the desert floor.  The recovery team found it the following day, 17 miles from the launch site. The camera and its motor, adapted from a B-29 machine gun, were destroyed, but the film inside a specially designed 1-inch armor plated canister was fine.

The rocket had reached an altitude of 65 miles in just 3 minutes before recording a view from San Diego to Salt Lake City to San Antonio. The curvature of the Earth was even more clearly shown than the previous record setting images taken by the Explorer II balloon from 13.7 miles 12 years earlier.

Clyde Holiday, the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory engineer who adapted the camera commented in a 1950 National Geographic Article “the entire land area of the globe might be mapped in this way”. He also pointed to using the technology to "photographing cloud formations, storm fronts, and overcast areas over an entire continent."

The rocket, originally developed in World War II by Germany WW2 “vengeance weapon” to attack Allied cities with one ton of high explosives in retaliation for bombings of German cities, found it was way to the New Mexico desert through of a Operation Paperclip.

The secret U.S. Army program delivered 1,600 German scientists and engineers along with 300 railcars filled with V-2 rockets and components to the United States following World War II. While rockets were used to further weapons development during the cold war, the remaining "surplus" were made available for scientific tests like this one.

Leading scientists in the program included Kurt Debus who became the first director of what is now NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as well as Wernher von Braun, chief architect of the Saturn V which launched the Apollo program to the Moon.