NASA erased the moon-landing tapes to reuse them

In July 1969, the cameras aboard the lunar module Eagle were transmitting in a format called SSTV (Slow-Scan Television): 320 lines at 10 frames per second. Before rebroadcasting to the networks, NASA converted the signal to the broadcast standard of 525 lines and 30 fps. The original SSTV tapes, about forty-five of them, were archived at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Between 1981 and 1985, in the middle of a magnetic-tape shortage, those reels were erased and reused to record satellite data. No one signed the order; it was routine.

In 2006 NASA put together a team, led by former mission director Richard Nafzger, to recover the tapes ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the landing. They searched for three years, in archives in Perth, Sydney, Washington. Nothing turned up. In 2009 they announced that the best original images of the first human step on the Moon had been lost for good.

They paid $230,000 to Lowry Digital, a Burbank studio that specialises in film restoration, to clean up the best commercial copy still around: the reel Walter Cronkite had aired that dawn on CBS.