  We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE),
an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar
atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, surface gravity) of up to one
million stars using the 6dF multi-object spectrograph on the 1.2-m UK Schmidt
Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO). The RAVE program started
in 2003, obtaining medium resolution spectra (median R=7,500) in the Ca-triplet
region ($\lambda\lambda$ 8,410--8,795 \AA) for southern hemisphere stars drawn
from the Tycho-2 and SuperCOSMOS catalogs, in the magnitude range 9<I<12. The
first data release is described in this paper and contains radial velocities
for 24,748 individual stars (25,274 measurements when including
re-observations). Those data were obtained on 67 nights between 11 April 2003
to 03 April 2004. The total sky coverage within this data release is
$\sim$4,760 square degrees. The average signal to noise ratio of the observed
spectra is 29.5, and 80% of the radial velocities have uncertainties better
than 3.4 km/s. Combining internal errors and zero-point errors, the mode is
found to be 2 km/s. Repeat observations are used to assess the stability of our
radial velocity solution, resulting in a variance of 2.8 km/s. We demonstrate
that the radial velocities derived for the first data set do not show any
systematic trend with color or signal to noise. The RAVE radial velocities are
complemented in the data release with proper motions from Starnet 2.0, Tycho-2
and SuperCOSMOS, in addition to photometric data from the major optical and
infrared catalogs (Tycho-2, USNO-B, DENIS and 2MASS). The data release can be
accessed via the RAVE webpage: http://www.rave-survey.org.
