In June 1976, US$217.77 bought a university student 1,150 reels of used NASA tape and, entirely by accident, what an auction house would later bill as the sharpest surviving footage of humans walking on the moon.
Gary George was an engineering student at Lamar University in Texas, interning at Johnson Space Center, and he occasionally tagged along to government surplus auctions with workmates. At one held at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, he won a single lot of magnetic tape with NASA listed as the owning agency, as documented in the Sotheby’s catalogue entry for the reels. His plan was to flip them. A fresh reel of broadcast-grade Ampex tape cost about US$260 back then, used reels could be wiped and recorded over, and local TV stations were an obvious market.
Most of the haul ended up where he expected. Some were sold, others were donated to the university and to a local church that televised its Sunday services, and the smaller formats were scrapped or binned. A few Texan sermons were presumably preserved on NASA leftovers.
Three boxes survived the clear-out.
His father had spotted small printed stickers on them reading “APOLLO 11 EVA | July 20, 1969”, EVA being NASA shorthand for extravehicular activity, meaning time spent outside the spacecraft. Dad reckoned those ones were worth keeping. George agreed, put them away and left them alone for 32 years.
Why the moonwalk looked murky on home television
Getting live television off the moon meant squeezing it into a very small pipe. Voice, telemetry, the astronauts’ medical readings and the picture all had to share one radio link, so NASA allotted video just 500 kilohertz of bandwidth, roughly a ninth of what commercial broadcasters used. Westinghouse built a camera to suit, shooting 10 frames a second at 320 lines of resolution instead of the American standard of 30 frames and 525 lines, as laid out in NASA’s final report on the Apollo 11 telemetry recordings.
No ordinary TV set could show that format. Tracking stations at Goldstone in California and at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia converted it on the fly, and the converted signal then travelled by microwave link, satellite and landline to Houston, losing sharpness at every hop. Engineers watching the raw feed on special monitors saw a crisp picture. The public got ghosts.
George’s tapes sit partway along that chain. They were recorded at Mission Control on Ampex VR-2000 machines from the converted feed, capturing the moonwalk as flight controllers saw it on their big screen. Home viewers got a further-degraded version, after a 1,600-mile (roughly 2,600-kilometre) relay of microwave towers carried it to the networks in New York. Together the three tapes run for 2 hours and 24 minutes and cover almost the entire moonwalk, including a phone call from President Richard Nixon.
How NASA wiped its own best copies
“We all wish we had 20-20 hindsight,” Dick Nafzger, the Goddard Space Flight Center television specialist who helped lead the search for the missing recordings, told NPR in 2009.
The raw, unconverted feed had been captured at the three tracking stations on one-inch telemetry tapes, purely as insurance in case the live relay failed. Nafzger estimated 45 reels in total. They were shipped to Goddard in Maryland, then into a federal records warehouse, and dropped out of anyone’s thoughts. The hunt for them only began in 1997, when an operations scientist at Parkes started asking where they were.
By the early 1980s NASA had a tape crisis. Stock made with a new synthetic binder was failing within a couple of years, its magnetic coating peeling off onto playback heads, a fault known in the trade as sticky shed syndrome. Meanwhile satellites such as Landsat were chewing through tape around the clock. In 1981 alone, per the same NASA report, Goddard pulled 25,443 boxes of tape back out of storage. Old reels had their labels stripped, were erased with powerful magnets, got recertified and went back to work.
No smoking gun ever turned up. The search team nonetheless concluded that the moonwalk backups were most likely wiped and reused during that scramble. Nobody had flagged them as special, and the storage paperwork described them only as magnetic tapes, with no mission named.
How three forgotten reels reached a Sotheby’s sale
In early 2008, a fellow member of George’s Texas ski club, who happened to be a NASA video engineer, mentioned that the agency was hunting for its original moonwalk tapes ahead of the 40th anniversary. George was put in touch with NASA, but the two sides never settled on what to do with them, or even how to play them.
So he took them to DC Video, a Burbank studio that still had working two-inch machines. In October 2008 the tapes ran, very possibly for the first time since July 1969, in faultless condition. They were digitised that December and returned to their boxes.
On 20 July 2019, the 50th anniversary of the landing, Sotheby’s sold the trio for US$1.82 million. That works out to around 8,000 times what George paid for the entire lot, as the auction house pointed out in a statement carried by CNBC.
NASA’s own report, written while plans to return to the moon were being drawn up, closed by urging the agency to make sure historically important recordings find a permanent home in the National Archives. The three reels that dodged the eraser ended up with a winning bidder who, as UPI reported, wasn’t identified.