NASA erased moon footage - What's the value of your digital assets?

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On July 20th 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of this historic event, NASA releases restored videos of the lunar excursion.

NASA admitted that it must have erased the original videos of the live TV transmission so that it could resuse the videotape. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

The space agency admitted that "A three-year search for these original telemetry tapes was unsuccessful. A final report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the near future and will be publicly released at that time."

NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger said a the search led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

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Read more:
NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it (AP)
NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video (NASA)