The Apollo 11 missing tapes

The Apollo 11 missing tapes were those that were recorded from Apollo 11's slow-scan television (SSTV) telecast in its raw format on telemetry data tape at the time of the first Moon landing in 1969 and subsequently lost. The data tapes were used to record all transmitted data (video as well as telemetry) for backup.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

July 16, 2009 press conference on the search for and restoration of the Apollo 11 video.

During the search, though, Nafzger's team came across video that had been converted to broadcast which was much higher quality than what they had been seeing. 

“The team of people that I worked with, including myself obviously, was desperate to do something for history, if we could," said Nafzger. "We came across broadcast-converted tapes during this search that were much better than we had seen. . . . We had tapes recorded in Sydney, Australia, during the mission. (We) found kinescopes at the National Archives that had not been viewed in 36 years that were made in Houston. We went to CBS archives and we found tapes that had been fed directly from Houston to CBS . .. . the raw data as recorded and archived.”