In June 1976, a young engineering student named Gary George walked into a government surplus auction near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he was working as an intern. He left with 1,150 reels of used videotape that cost him about $218. More than four decades later, three of those reels sold for $1.82 million, because they held something NASA itself had lost: some of the clearest surviving footage of the first Moon walk.
George, then a student at Lamar University in Texas, did not buy the tapes because of what was on them. Blank broadcast-quality videotape was valuable in the 1970s, and his plan was simple: sell the reels to local television stations so they could record over them.
A box with a label nobody paid attention to
Most of the tapes went exactly where he expected. But among them was a box containing three reels with a handwritten label that meant little to him at the time: “Apollo 11 EVA, July 20, 1969.” EVA stands for extravehicular activity, NASA’s term for the moment astronauts leave their spacecraft.
George kept that box. For years it stayed out of sight, while the rest of the reels were recorded over at local television stations.
Why a Houston recording turned out to be so valuable
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface, the camera on the lunar module sent its signal to three tracking stations on Earth, which relayed the images to Mission Control in Houston and, from there, to television networks around the world. Each step of that chain cost some image quality, so the picture most viewers saw at home was noticeably softer than what engineers received.
George’s reels were recorded at Mission Control in Houston. According to CNBC, they are considered the only surviving first-generation recordings of the Moon walk, sharper than the few network broadcast tapes that still exist. They contain about 2 hours and 24 minutes of footage, including Armstrong’s first steps and the planting of the American flag.
NASA had lost track of its own originals
The timing made the discovery even more remarkable. In 2006, NASA acknowledged that the original high-quality telemetry tapes of the Moon walk could not be found. As TIME reported, they were most likely erased and reused in the 1980s, when the agency was short of magnetic tape.
Around the 40th anniversary of the mission, as NASA searched for the best available footage, George realized what he might have. He had the reels analyzed and digitized, and the result revealed an unusually sharp, detailed image for footage that had never been restored or enhanced.
From $218 to $1.82 million at Sotheby’s
The tapes reached their peak value on July 20, 2019, exactly 50 years after the landing, when Sotheby’s put the three reels up for sale in New York as part of its space exploration auction. The estimate was between $1 million and $2 million, and bidding opened at $700,000.
The final price was $1.82 million, more than 8,000 times the $218 George paid for the whole lot of 1,150 tapes. Even adjusted for inflation, that purchase would have been worth under $1,000 in 2019. All because an intern held on to a box that almost anyone else would have recorded over.
