Mystery of ‘lacking’ Apollo moon touchdown tapes solved after practically 60 years
The original high-quality transmission of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was recorded onto backup magnetic tapes, which were mistakenly wiped by NASA when reusing old tapes due to shortages
Experts have claimed recordings of the moon landing were accidentally deleted (Image: NASA/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Recordings containing the original, top-quality broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing were accidentally erased after being discreetly stored in an unlabelled storage facility by NASA.
Whilst other footage of the landmark 1969 mission remained intact, the discovery that some moon landing video vanished has sparked outlandish theories that NASA has been concealing what the astronauts witnessed or even that the entire mission was staged.
The reality behind these “deleted” recordings has now been uncovered by Tim Dodd, known as the Everyday Astronaut on YouTube, who revealed the missing material was merely a collection of reserve magnetic tapes holding the unprocessed signal from space.
Dodd clarified that NASA deemed the reserve tapes less vital since all the crucial information, footage, and radio communications were successfully relayed to Houston and aired live on television.
The backup versions of Apollo 11’s groundbreaking mission were accidentally recorded over when NASA recycled older magnetic tapes owing to a scarcity of those particular film reels during the 1970s and 1980s.
During his appearance on the Danny Jones Podcast, Dodd noted that nobody at that time foresaw that future technology would enable upscaling or improving the resolution of the unprocessed footage for superior quality, which is achievable today.
Nevertheless, NASA still holds thousands of hours of evidence confirming the first moon landing genuinely occurred, including lower-resolution versions of technical data, sound recordings, and footage from Houston’s archives. Dodd revealed that the space agency still possesses remarkably crisp 70 millimetre film from the cameras Apollo astronauts operated on the lunar surface, a film quality that continues to be utilised in IMAX cinemas 57 years on.
Dodd, who produces educational content about rockets, space exploration, and NASA’s heritage, explained precisely what became of the wiped moon landing recordings, beginning with how the transmission was beamed back from Apollo 11 to Earth.
The live broadcast from the lunar surface was transmitted to receiving stations, including one situated in California’s Mojave Desert, before being divided into two separate feeds.
One stream was directed to Mission Control in Houston for immediate monitoring, where all spacecraft telemetry data, audio and visual content were captured.
The footage at Mission Control was transformed from the moon’s “slow-scan” format to standard NTSC television format using a “kinescope” technique, meaning the space agency filmed a screen with a camera to make it suitable for television broadcasts.
This adapted version was what viewers witnessed at home in 1969, which was of inferior quality compared to the footage on the magnetic tapes but “adequate” at the time, according to Dodd.
