WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – The original recordings of  the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased  and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original  broadcast look even better, NASA officials said yesterday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital  make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the  blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin  walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank,  California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September.  The preview is available at http://www.nasa.gov.

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 Center 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.