Left: The first ever rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Bumper 2 (based on the V-2 weapon design), was in July 1950. Right: The Kepler space telescope launches onboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, March 2009 (NASA)

Kepler, the exoplanet-hunting space telescope, successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on top of a Delta II rocket at 10:49 pm EST. In a word: awesome. Unfortunately I missed lift off, but it was good to watch NASA TV as the flames from the first stage receded into the black. Obviously today’s event will come as a huge relief to NASA having lost the Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO) last month when the Taurus XL upper stage fairing failed to separate, locking the satellite in a doomed sub-orbital trajectory, crashing into the Antarctic Ocean.

The highest any rocket had gone before: A 1947 US V-2 rocket, with nose cone camera, captures the limb of the Earth (NASA)

On checking out the NASA homepage, the headline news was obviously about Kepler, but underneath was a fascinating image (left). From the NASA Image of the Day, there’s a vintage piece of spaceflight history. Two images, one facing north, the other south, shows the first view from an altitude of over 100 miles (160 km). The pictures were taken by a camera in the nose cone of an experimental V-2 rocket launched by the US on March 7th, 1947. The V-2 technology, as used by Nazi Germany in World War II, had been captured after the war and developed by US scientists. In this case, the V-2 nose cone housed a camera, rather than an explosive warhead, to carry out the first high altitude atmospheric observations.

The camera returned a series of images to the Earth, and these striking panoramas were constructed, covering a million square miles of our planet’s surface. This was the first time a rocket had been used for rudimentary space science; before this time, rockets only had military applications.

62 years later, almost to the day, a Delta II carries one of the most ambitious NASA projects into orbit, to begin another peaceful application, not studying the atmosphere of our own planet, but to search for other Earths orbiting distant stars.

How far we’ve come…

For more about Kepler’s launch and exciting mission, check out Anne Minard’s article on the Universe Today, “Success: Kepler Lifts Off to Look for Other Earths“