On October 24, 1946, a research rocket took the first pictures of the Earth from space at an altitude of 105 km above the ground.
The missiles were launched from White Sands Missile Range military base in New Mexico, USA. It was a German V2 rocket captured by the Americans at the end of World War II.
Hundreds of scientists and engineers from the Nazi rocket program were vital to the post-war development of American space programs. Despite the fact that during the war in cities V2 rockets carried explosions and deaths, in peacetime the explosive warhead was removed and replaced with a set of scientific instruments. They included a 35mm moving lens camera that captured one image every 1.5 seconds.
The resulting images were captured on film and then dropped to Earth in a rigid steel box. They were not like anything that people could see before.
Up to this point, the highest point of view from which photographs of the earth's surface were taken was about 22 km, aboard the balloon. In the images taken from the balloon, there was a little noticeable curvature of the Earth on the horizon, but the image from the rocket showed our planet in a completely different way.
Clyde Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, predicted in a 1950 article in National Geographic that one day the entire globe would be photographed in the same way.