Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits

Talk about penny wise and pound foolish!

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Centre in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the
ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking
for them.

The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed — magnetically erased — and re-used to save money. —Reuters

So the tapes NASA recently released are restored from less-degraded copies.