Nazis And Dead Dogs: Spaceflight Before The Space Race

The first image of Earth from space was taken by a V 2 rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico. (Credit: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) In October 1957, a basketball-sized metallic sphere began circling Earth, transmitting a beacon from above. For many, the launch of Sputnik 1 heralded in the Space Age. But lost often in the story of Sputnik, the Space Age, and the Space Race is that Sputnik wasn’t the first spaceflight, and that the first image of Earth from space didn’t come in the 1960s, but the 1940s. The actual first spaceflight is a matter of debate. The Air Force defines space as starting at 50 miles (80 kilometers) while NASA and others generally believe that the boundary of Earth and space is 62 miles (100 km). That definition places the date of the first space launch in the midst of World War II. But, of course, it wasn’t the good guys launching the rockets.