It’s a truly iconic moment in human history – one that anyone who watched it live will never forget.

And even for those of us born long after the event, who could fail to recognise Neil Armstrong’s words – “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – as he took mankind’s first ever steps on the moon.

If you were alive and watching live on July 21, 1969, incredibly the footage only had a lag of a few seconds seconds – the time it took the radio signals to transmit from the moon to Earth, and then be converted into broadcast format.

So Armstrong’s generation-defining words only took a couple of seconds to travel from the moon to your living room: something that back then, must have seemed incomprehensible.

Given it was such an iconic moment, you’d think that the original footage would have been recorded onto tapes, perhaps even duplicated, then placed into secure archives for safekeeping.

But alarmingly, no such process took place. While the original raw footage was successfully transmitted both to NASA stations and to the general public, little regard was given to what would happen to the footage afterwards.

As a NASA report confirms, everyone was a little too excited about what was actually happening in the moment to really consider the preservation of the moment for the future.

And then, the unthinkable happened. Later down the line, NASA team members realised that the footage was missing.

This triggered a years-long search, with engineer Richard Nafzger – who oversaw the original transmission of the footage – at the helm.

But sadly, as the report explained, their search ultimately ended up being in vain.

The ultimate conclusion is that, over time, the original recordings were magnetically erased – because of the extreme amounts of data NASA began processing as space travel and the launch of satellites, they proceeded to record over old tapes, with the huge number of Apollo 11 tapes among the victims of this.

Of course, the organisation has significant regrets now – tempered only slightly by the fact that, thanks to the live broadcast, plenty of footage still exists.

But sometimes it takes an almighty mistake to learn, and NASA have certainly learned their lesson from this!

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