July 16
Three reels of Moon-Landing tapes that were bought by an intern 43 years ago for a couple hundred dollars could fetch $1 million at an auction this week.
Sotheby’s is offering the tapes of NASA recordings of the Apollo 11 lunar landing as the “earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man’s first steps on the moon”. Somewhat amazingly, they surfaced from a retiree named Gary George who while interning at NASA bought them at a surplus auction in 1976 (which raises some questions about the space administration’s storage and preservation procedures of the time). The tapes are both interesting for their content and rarity but also because NASA itself claims to have been looking for similar tapes for years as not many first-generation recordings still exist.
“In the 2000s, NASA led a search for them and concluded that they had almost certainly been reused or erased during a tape shortage at NASA in the early 1980s.”
Accidental erasure is often a cause of simple data loss. Thankfully, these rare pieces have also been digitized from their odd 10 frame per second format onto a hard drive which is included in the auction. The complexity of capturing and beaming signals of video in almost realtime from the moon down to us should not be lost. It required ‘slow scan’ instrumentation to record and then at stations on Earth convert to the standard television broadcast rate of 30 fps that the world would see in 1969 as Neil Armstrong made his famous declaration. That milestone reaches it’s 50th anniversary this weekend which is the reason for the timing of the auction.
Read more coverage of this story here: How Moon-Landing Tapes Found in a $218 Batch Could Fetch $1 Million
Update July 20th,
NASA videotape recordings of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing sell for $1.8 million in our New York salesroom
Category: data recovery
Tags: data, government, space, tape recovery
