NASA finally concluded, after three years of futile searching, that it accidentally erased the videotape of the historic July 20, 1969, lunar landing. The nation's space agency apparently had a shortage of videotape in the 1970s and 1980s and erased and reused about 200,000 tapes, the lunar landing among them.
Recycling such a significant piece of footage, even inadvertently, is unthinkable. It's like using the Declaration of Independence to jot down a phone number. NASA should have been a better custodian of its historic images, and this mishap makes one wonder what else might have been lost.
But at least NASA's carelessness hasn't left the world without a visual record of Neil Armstrong's stroll on the lunar surface. Television video copies still exist, and a Hollywood film restoration company is three weeks into a project to improve the quality of those images.
The company, Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., isn't a stranger to space -- if one counts its work in refurbishing "Star Wars." But the moon video was "by far and away the lowest quality" they had worked with, the company's president said.
Granted, NASA's focus wasn't cinematography -- or history. But the agency should have been more concerned about preserving the lunar landing for posterity. Forty years later, it's good that the footage is finally being brought into sharper focus.