It sounds like a predictable plot for a classic TV sitcom -- the videotape of an important event is erased and taped over. However, in 2006, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 'fessed up: no one could find the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing from July 1969. "One giant leap for mankind" -- that moon landing. It turns out that NASA's moon landing tapes were among a batch of about 200,000 tapes that were magnetically erased and reused to save money.
Leave it to the media to save the day. NASA acquired good copies of news broadcasts, notably from CBS News, along with tapes called kinescopes found in the film vaults at Johnson Space Center in Houston. These tapes, along with other bits and pieces, were reassembled and remastered into a watchable whole. John Lowry, of Lowry Digital in California, had digitally restored many old movies, and his team worked their magic on the moon landing tapes to create archive-worthy footage of the event, which has now been safely preserved.
Interesting facts about the Apollo 11 television broadcast:
- The CBS News broadcast garnered the number one rating for network evening news in 1969.
- An estimated 600 million people watched the moon landing on live television.
- CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite was on the air for 31 of the 34 hours of continuous broadcasting.
