Student’s $200 purchase yields lunar landing recordings worth millions

In 1976, Gary George, a NASA intern in Houston, Texas, purchased approximately 1,150 magnetic tapes from a NASA surplus auction for $217.77.

George intended to resell the tapes to local television stations after erasing their contents. However, his father advised him to keep three tapes labeled “APOLLO 11 EVA | July 20, 1969”. These three tapes held around 144 minutes of footage from the Apollo 11 moonwalk, including Neil Armstrong’s descent, Buzz Aldrin’s arrival, and conversations with Richard Nixon.

The tapes were first-generation recordings made at Mission Control after converting the signal received from the Moon. While NASA had original recordings made directly from the lunar camera, they believed those had been erased and reused. George’s tapes were exceptionally well-preserved copies of the converted signal. For decades, George stored the tapes and forgot about them until 2008, when a contact at NASA informed him the agency was searching for recordings of the moonwalk in advance of its 40th anniversary.

After locating an archivist with the necessary equipment, the tapes were played for the first time since 1969, digitized, and then sold at auction by Sotheby’s in New York. Three bidders competed for the tapes, and they ultimately sold for $1.82 million, approximately 8,000 times the price George originally paid for the entire lot.