A camera rides a captured Nazi rocket 65 miles up and photographs the curve of the Earth
A year after the war ended, the U.S. Army was still firing captured German V-2 rockets into the New Mexico sky, searching for anything useful the technology could do. On October 24, 1946, V-2 No. 13 launched from White Sands carrying a 35-millimeter DeVry motion-picture camera bolted on by engineer Clyde T. Holliday. It reached roughly 65 miles before falling back and shattering on impact, destroying the camera. The film inside survived, and on it was the first photograph of Earth ever taken from outer space.
The Army's White Sands program turned a captured Nazi weapon into an orbital camera platform years before the phrase 'space race' existed. Holliday's photographs, stitched into a sequence covering 40,000 square miles, convinced American military planners and scientists that rockets could be instruments of observation, not just destruction.
QWhere did the hardware for V-2 No. 13 actually come from?
The rocket itself was a hybrid. General Electric, which ran the Army's Hermes program, assembled No. 13 using a mix of genuine captured German V-2 parts and components the company had re-manufactured domestically to American specifications. By 1946 the original German stockpile shipped over after the war was already being supplemented and replaced piece by piece, since many of the original rockets had been damaged, cannibalized, or used up in earlier test flights. Hermes had been running since 1944, originally as an Army effort to study and reverse-engineer German rocketry before the war even ended. No. 13's mixed parentage made it a transitional machine, caught between salvaged Nazi engineering and the American industrial base that would soon build rockets from scratch.
QWhat federal legal case involving the International Finance Corporation later cited this era's precedents?
Decades after V-2 No. 13 fell to earth, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Jam et al. v. International Finance Corp., decided in 2019 under citation 586 U.S. 199. The case addressed whether international organizations like the IFC, a World Bank Group affiliate, could claim broad immunity from lawsuits in American courts. It stands alongside other period cases such as Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 and Carpenter v. United States in the Supreme Court's reporter record. These rulings have no direct link to rocketry or White Sands, but they occupy the same federal documentary record, the U.S. Reports, that preserves government actions of lasting consequence, rocket launches included.
QWhat boundary does 65 miles actually represent in the history of spaceflight?
The 100-kilometer mark, known as the Karman line, is the altitude most commonly used today to define where outer space begins. V-2 No. 13 climbed to roughly 105 kilometers (65 miles), clearing the 100-kilometer threshold by about three miles. That line would not even be proposed until the 1960s, when physicist Theodore von Karman calculated the altitude at which a vehicle would need to travel faster than orbital velocity just to get enough lift from the thin atmosphere. In 1946, nobody at White Sands was measuring against that future standard. They were simply trying to see how high a captured weapon could fly, and happened to clear a boundary that did not yet exist on paper.
