3 a
“Rocketborne sequence camera films 1400-mile strip extending from Wyoming into Mexico. Aerobee still ascending, photo made from about 16 miles up. Three of seven” (caption).
The curvature of the Earth is not yet apparent.
3 b
[Associated Press Photo caption] Rocket camera photographs Earth’s curvature.
At an altitude of about 57 miles, a sequence camera in aerobee rocket fired at White Sands Proving Grounds made this picture plainly showing the curvature of the Earth and the ground haze around it. This is part of a strip in which a 1,400 mile area, from Wyoming into Mexico, was filmed.
Clyde Holliday of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) assembled this photograph with other such photographs taken by a V-2 mounted automatic camera some sixty miles up into a panorama which was released on October 19, 1946.
“’Columbus was right!’, was the popular newspaper headline and the panoramic picture was accepted as ‘man’s first view of the curvature of the Earth’” (Poole, pp. 59-61).
3 c
[Press caption] credit US NAVY / Johns Hopkins (APL) Camera’s return with rocket pictures
Mr Clyde T. Holliday, of the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, located at Silver Springs, Maryland, is shown inspecting two of the cameras used in the filming sequence. The camera on the left was used on a V2 rocket, and the one on the right was used in an aerobee rocket. Oddly enough, all three cameras, two in the aerobee and in the V-2 came through intact and shutters and lens were in perfect condition.
Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, worked for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), alongside pioneering space scientists like James Van Allen and S. Fred Singer, both of whom would later be involved in planning the first U.S. satellites. The cameras were mounted on a V-2 rocket NO. 40 and an aerobee rocket both launched on July 26, 1948. Stitched together, the photographs clearly showed the curvature of the Earth and the planet set against the blackness of space.
Holliday wrote in National Geographic in 1950, that the V-2 photos showed for the first time “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship”.
Holliday was also responsible for the first photograph ever taken from space (from an altitude of 65 miles, above the Karman line at 62 miles or 100 km) captured on October 24, 1946 by a DeVry 35 mm black-and-white motion picture camera mounted on V-2 rocket No. 13 launched at White Sands Missile Range.
3 d
This photograph is a motion picture frame from footage taken during V-2 flight No. 56, launched from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, November 18, 1949, which attained a height of 77 miles.
The photograph was taken from an altitude of about 40 miles less than two minutes after launch. The curvature of the Earth is not yet apparent.
3 e
This photograph is a motion picture frame from footage taken during V-2 flight No. 56, launched from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, November 18, 1949, which attained a height of 77 miles.
At an approximate height of 75 miles, the curvature of the Earth is apparent and the area shown includes portions of California. The rocket had been in the air slightly more than three-minutes.
3 f
The first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral was Bumper No.8, a modified version of Wernher von Braun’s V-2.
“A new chapter in space flight began on July 1950 with the launch of the first rocket from Pad 3 at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Bumper 8 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 km, higher than even modern space shuttles fly today. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, the Bumper 8 was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper 8 rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts. Seven years later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I and II, the Earth’s first artificial satellites” (https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_765.html)
3 g
This photograph of the Earth’s surface from 100 miles up was made during a record-breaking flight from White Sands Proving Ground, N.M., in October 1954. The rocket was built by General Aerojet Corporation. This frame was used to construct a larger panoramic view which showed the largest area of Earth hitherto photographed.
“Camera looks almost due south, showing the Rio Grande Valley at lower left. Dark streak at upper right is the Gulf of California; black space above the horizon is the sky. From bottom to top the picture covers approximately 900 miles [...]. The photograph is a blowup of a single 16mm motion picture film frame made by a standard Sun turret camera modified for rocket use” (Associated Press caption).
3 h
This composite photograph was made up of prints of 16-mm motion picture film exposed about 100 miles above the Earth. The camera was in a rocket built by General Aerojet Corporation and fired from White Sands in October 1954.
About one and a quarter million square miles of the Earth from Nebraska to the Pacific were pictured and showed the largest area of Earth ever photographed from space at that time. The curvature is not the Earth’s but the rocket’s own ringed horizon 900 miles away. The photograph showed entire meteorological systems for the first time.
“Cameras carried on sounding rockets and missiles first demonstrated the value of high-altitude photography in meteorology. These pictures were recovered from film packs carried aloft. They stimulated the development and employment of equipment to televise views obtainable from satellites to stations on Earth” (Cortright, p. 4).
“The spiral cloud pattern in the upper left center was produced by a tropical disturbance that had moved over Texas from the Gulf of Mexico. Decreasing in intensity, it did not disturb the surface winds, but maintained a tight cyclonic circulation in the upper atmosphere. At a glance, this picture documented a flood-producing circulation that was undetected by routine means after moving over Texas. Photography from rockets stimulated the meteorological satellite program, but no previous picture had been as dramatic as this, nor as convincing that satellite surveillance of hurricanes was feasible. Here was the first demonstration that storms could be detected by ultra-high level photographs (since borne out by thousands of satellite pictures). This mosaic was constructed by Otto Berg, who was in charge of the Naval Research Laboratory’s rocket photography” remembered Lester Hubert, of the National Environmental Satellite Center (Cortright, p. 4).
.jpg?mode=max&width=600)