Back in 1976, NASA gave 1,150 reels of 2-inch Quadruplex videotape to a government surplus auction. Gary George, a former intern at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, snapped up the lot of them for $218, in the hopes of selling them to news stations to record over for $50 a pop. He never watched them, but because his dad was a space buff, kept three of the tapes marked as “Apollo 11 EVA” (aka Extravehicular Activity, better known as a spacewalk). When he eventually watched the tapes, he realized that he had one of three surviving copies of one of the greatest feats of human ingenuity, the July 20, 1969 Moon landing. Now, those videotapes will be auctioned off to the highest bidder when Sotheby’s will mark the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by putting the tapes up for sale on July 20th, at a starting bid of $700,000.
“I had no idea there was anything of value on them,” George said in an interview with Reuters. He started to get suspicious in 2006, after NASA admitted they had lost the tapes, and believed they could have been in the 2,614 boxes of Apollo mission tapes that were sent to a storage facility in late 1969. George got in touch with video archivist David Crosthwait in California, who had the necessary equipment to view the vintage tapes. In December 2008, George played the reels and quickly realized what he had been storing over the last few decades. He contacted NASA about the reels but “an agreement could not be reached,” according to the auction listing, and off to the auction block they go as part of an auction dedicated to Space Exploration.
According to the auction site, the two-and-a-half hours of footage offer an “unrestored, unenhanced and unremastered” look at the history-making moon landing, straight from Mission Control. Whoever buys the historical footage will see the sharpest images available of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon’s surface, the extremely long-distance phone call with then-President Richard Nixon, and see the planting of the American flag. The tape has reportedly only been viewed three times since June 1976.
While the auction has plenty of items to excite space fans, there’s little doubt that there will be a fierce bidding war for the tapes. It’s hard to imagine that noted space fans Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk won’t want to win the tapes to play in the offices of Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
