- [Astronaut] Five, four,
three, two, one, zero.
All engines running.
Lift off.
We have a lift off 32
minutes past the hour.
Liftoff on Apollo 11.
(rocket engines roaring)
- 50 years ago,
the world witnessed an
unprecedented milestone.
An impossible achievement.
The manifestation of human curiosity,
technology, and sheer force of will.
Neil Armstrong stepped onto
the surface of the moon
in an event broadcast live
to over 500 million people.
A small camera, strapped
upside down to the Apollo 11
Lunar Module, transmitted this
incredible moment to Earth.
In stark black and white
at 10 frames per second.
The seven pound Westinghouse
SSTV space camera
was a technological feat.
But, there was a problem.
The space camera couldn't
broadcast in the right resolution
or frame rate for television.
So, in order to show the
world this momentous occasion
engineers at NASA tracking stations
took the lunar signal,
displayed it on a 
10-inch video monitor,
and used TV cameras to
literally film the monitor.
This recording, with different
contrast, brightness
and resolution was 
broadcast worldwide.
However, the original,
raw, high resolution stream
was also recorded onto
one-inch telemetry tapes
as a backup.
Those historically valuable
tapes were stored away
until the early 1980's.
Which is when NASA completely
lost track of them.
That's right, NASA lost
the original recordings
of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
Well, maybe lost isn't
quite the right word.
The original tapes were most
likely reused, or overwritten,
with low resolution satellite imagery
for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
Because they were 
running out of tapes.
Gone.
Seemingly, forever.
(radio static)
- But that's
not the end of the story.
In 2006, NASA announced they
were going to try to track down
any original high-resolution copies.
The search team was
headed by Richard Nafzger,
a former NASA 
engineer who oversaw
the original Apollo 11 broadcast,
along with Stan Lebar,
the man who designed
the original Westinghouse 
lunar camera
and other key figures involved
in the 1969 broadcast.
In an article by Wired, the
team described the process
of hunting through four million boxes
at the Washington 
National Record Center.
These records are not
organized, not digitized,
and not efficiently cataloged.
Thousands of boxes were
destroyed by a sprinkler system.
140,000 tapes from the Apollo era
were checked out 
and never returned.
Some of the places that 
they were sent
had their contents destroyed, erased,
or simply degraded 
through bad storage.
- The records clearly showed
that there was an 
inescapable conclusion
that this team has reached, 
and that is
that these 45 tapes were included
in the several hundred
thousand that were pulled out,
re certified, degaussed, and
put back into the network.
The slow-scan recordings 
are no longer.
- Yes.
The original lost Apollo 11 tapes
are most likely overwritten,
outdated satellite imagery.
But that didn't mean they
came up with nothing.
Their search resulted in
unmuddied, high resolution copies
from the original 
broadcast recordings.
For the first time in decades,
new, high-resolution 
images and video
were available to the public,
never before seen quite like this.
- [Armstrong] That's
one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
