When did the first photograph of Earth from space appear?

On 24 October 1946 a modified German V-2 rocket carried a small motion picture camera to an altitude of about 105 kilometres before falling back to the desert. The film survived the crash inside a steel cassette and produced grainy black and white images showing the curve of the Earth against the blackness of space. These were the first pictures of our planet taken from above the recognised boundary of space. They were far cruder than the famous colour images of later decades, but they proved such photography was possible. Later missions, including the Blue Marble image from Apollo 17 in 1972, gave the world its iconic views of Earth.