Historic record could fetch $1M

The Apollo 11 moonwalk wasn’t the first broadcast sent from space, but in geographic reach, it was the most astonishing. Microwave links, satellites and landlines carried images of Neil Armstrong’s steps around the globe from Australia and the United States to Japan and Europe, even parts of the Eastern Bloc, in virtually real time. This was live TV from more than 200,000 miles away, using the technology of 1969.

Although the experience of watching that event looms large in memory for those who saw it, for NASA historians and other space experts, the preservation of that broadcast has provided its own drama.

Today, the moon landing’s 50th anniversary, three reels of videotape will be auctioned at Sotheby’s, marketed as “the only surviving first-generation recordings of the historic moon walk” and “the earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man’s first steps on the moon.”

According to Sotheby’s, a NASA intern named Gary George bought the recordings as part of a collection of 1,150 reels at a government surplus auction in 1976. He paid $217.77 for them. The bidding today starts at $700,000, and Sotheby’s estimates they will sell for more than $1 million.

So-called slow-scan tapes, which captured images directly from the moon, have likely been lost forever. In the 2000s, NASA led a search for them and concluded they had almost certainly been reused or erased during a tape shortage at NASA in the early 1980s.

Videotape recordings of the broadcast that NASA kept in Houston didn’t fare much better: They suffered irreparable damage during storage.

These unfortunate events let George’s tapes earn the honor of being called the earliest known remaining recording of the broadcast.