Apollo 11 Missing Tapes

The Apollo 11 missing tapes are missing slow-scan television (SSTV) recordings of the lunar transmissions broadcast during the Apollo 11 moonwalk, which was the first time human beings walked on the Moon. The tapes carried SSTV and telemetry data recorded onto analog data recording tape. The SSTV data was recorded as a backup against any failure of the live television broadcasts. To allow broadcast of the SSTV transmission on standard television, a real-time conversion from SSTV format was done. The converted video of the moonwalk was broadcast live around the world on July 21, 1969 (UTC). Many videotapes and kinescopes were made of this broadcast as it happened, and these have never been missing. Meanwhile, the missing tapes which carried recordings of the SSTV signal as transmitted from the Moon, but before undergoing scan conversion, are believed to have been erased and reused by NASA, along with many thousands of other tapes. (NASA was faced with a shortage of quality data tapes in the early 1980s due to a change in the manufacturing process in the mid-1970s. This caused tapes that were no longer needed to be reused.) If the original SSTV format tapes were found, modern technology could be easily and cheaply used to make a higher-quality conversion, yielding better images than those originally seen. There are several still photographs, along with a few short segments of super 8 movie film taken of a video monitor in Australia, which show the SSTV transmission before it was converted.

In 2009 NASA gathered old copies of the converted video and paid to have them processed by Lowry Digital. These restorations were released in 2010.