Taken by an automatic camera installed on a V2 rocket by scientists of the Naval Research Laboratory

The first photograph taken from more than 100 miles out in space

March 7, 1947

Vintage gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper, 15.2 x 18.8cm, original press photo with New York Times press photo caption titled “The Earth from 100 miles up” and dated “25th March 1947” as well as New York Times England credit stamp on the verso

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Lot Essay

This view of the Earth made by an automatic camera in V-2 No.21 rocket launched at the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, was taken at an altitude of 100 miles, opening a new era in photography.

More than 200,000 square miles of the United States and Mexico are shown. The distance from the curved horizon at the top of the picture to the bottom is 900 miles. The dark area at upper left is the Pacific Ocean, the narrow dark area below it is the Gulf of California with lower California in between. The camera was installed by scientists of the Naval Research Laboratory of Washington, D.C.

“On March 7, 1947, not long after the end of World War II and years before Sputnik ushered in the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful in these grainy black-and-white photos - the first pictures of Earth as seen from altitude greater than 100 miles in space.
Just the year before in 1946, scientists like John T. Mengel, a NASA pioneer who later oversaw the Vanguard Program, began experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets. Mengel conducted upper atmosphere experiments by launching the rockets into near-Earth orbit. He designed and fabricated the first research nose shell to replace of the V-2 warhead and began placing cameras in the nose shell. Before the Small Steps Program began in 1946 using V-2 rockets to take images from space, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which ascended 13.7 miles in 1935” (https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1298.html)