Apollo 11 moon landing videotapes sell at auction for $1.8 million
Footage of the first moon landing taken in 1969 during NASA's Apollo 11 mission was purchased at auction through Sotheby's for $1.82 million on Saturday.
The collection of footage totals about 2 hours and 24 minutes across three reels of film recorded at Mission Control in Houston, Texas. This footage is the "earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man's first steps on the moon," according to Sotheby's.
The tapes include recordings of Mission Control as it waited for the lunar-surface camera to be deployed, as well as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first steps on the moon and the moment that the astronauts planted the American flag on the surface. Minus the 9 minutes of Mission Control footage, the tapes contain the entire duration of the lunar extravehicular activity (EVA).
The Sotheby's listing notes that the audio quality on these tapes is excellent.
While this footage is probably the best look we'll get at the first time humans stepped foot on the moon, this isn't the best footage that ever existed.
When NASA filmed the EVA during the mission, it was broadcast from the moon to NASA on Earth in what's known as slow-scan television (SSTV) format and recorded raw on data tape. In order to broadcast the EVA to television viewers, the footage was simultaneously re-formatted in real time to the standard NTSC format and televised live to people all over the western hemisphere.
The footage purchased at auction are recordings of the re-formatted NTSC videos. It's believed that the raw SSTV footage was recorded over by NASA, so these NTSC reels are likely the best look we'll ever get of that momentous day on the moon.
All of the footage on the reels has been seen before, but as the footage was transmitted over the world, it lost a little bit of quality as it passed through each microwave tower, so the recordings at NASA are the best out there.
So who exactly was selling these tapes? An old NASA intern named Gary George who purchased the tapes at a government surplus auction in 1976. He paid just $217.77 for these reels and over 1,000 others at the time. George also digitized these tapes in 2008.
Sotheby's did not release the name of the person or company that bought the reels.
