10 Incredible Things Mankind Has Managed To Lose
7. The Original Moon Landing Footage
It's difficult to imagine a piece of footage more historically important than the 1969 Moon landing, when a human being set foot somewhere on an astral body other than the Earth for the first time. Such priceless images must have been carefully collated and preserved for all time, so future generations could find wisdom and inspiration in the tale they told.
Except NASA lost the original master tapes of the moon landing footage, because of course they did.
The original footage needed to be converted before it could be sent out to the world's TV sets, and that converted video is of way worse quality than what actually came in from the astronauts' cameras. That original footage is now completely gone although plenty of space geeks have spent years trying to find it again.
The rumour is that someone at NASA taped over it, thus robbing the world of non-rubbish images of our first forays into the cosmos. Whatever happened to the originals, their absence is one of the arguments used in the conspiracy theory that the Moon landing was a hoax. So nice going, NASA.