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This camera, part of a flying laboratory, is recoverd by Clyde Holliday
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of Johns Hopkins who prepared it for its trip to the upper stratosphere.
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Rivaling the fantastic imagination of Jules Verne, the camera brought back
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a record of a flight into the heavens of a captured German V-2 rocket.
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At White Sands, New Mexico, the huge missile takes off.
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Air Force pictures show the rocket in flight and the flying camera
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automatically takes over. The huge projectile drops the Earth behind at the
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tremendous speed of 4,000 feet per second. The rotation of the rocket
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causes the planet to spin before the lens. And the camera photographs
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the Earth 65 miles straight down. The horizon, 720 miles away, and the
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curvature of the Earth are astoninishingly apparent in this still picture
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from the film. An observer on the rocket could have seen San Diego,
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Salt Lake City, Kansas City, and San Antonio. Appoximately 1,600,000 square miles
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of the Earth's surface was revealed. The rocket reached the 65-mile height
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in three minutes. This giant engine of destruction, designed by Hitler to
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annihilate Allied nations, now serves the worthy cause of peacetime research!