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It has been more than 50 years since humans set foot on the Moon, but we’re going back. The upcoming Artemis Program landings might not happen as soon as NASA initially hoped, but you might be able to tide yourself over by reliving the past. A film archivist has gotten his hands on something special—a recording of the original Apollo 11 TV broadcast.
According to Elijah Reiss, who runs the RetroFreak84 YouTube channel, the film in question was listed on eBay with little in the way of background. The Sony V-32 tape had a label proclaiming it to be “Man on the Moon I,” so that’s what the eBay listing said. Reiss picked it up on the small chance it contained real footage of the Apollo Moon landings. Upon receiving the tape, Reiss noted that it has a July 1969 manufacturing date, which was the month of the first Moon landing.
You’ve probably seen footage of the Moon landings, but the original broadcast is murky. Television networks broadcasted the news live, but archiving such footage was not common at the time. Consumer video recording was almost unheard of. Nevertheless, someone saved a copy of the NBC broadcast event for Apollo 11’s historic landing using a CV2100, one of the first home video recorders in existence. Reiss confirmed that’s what was on the tape, but it wasn’t as simple as slapping it in a tape deck and hitting “play.”
While the half-inch V-32 tape was in good shape, these reels were not meant to last almost 60 years. They have a tendency to develop a sticky film that disrupts playback and can damage both player and tape. So, the first step in retrieving the video was to bake it at 155 degrees F to clear off that gunk. Next, Reiss loaded it into a Sony Helical scan player, which any self-respecting video archivist has lying around.
Getting that old analog video onto a digital system wasn’t as simple as plugging in a cable. First, the tape had to be cleaned with alcohol to remove the accumulated grime of 60 years. Next, the signal was passed through a time-based corrector, which can eliminate the mechanical instability of old media. But it works—this rediscovered tape contains about an hour of the original NBC Apollo 11 broadcast, consisting of pre-landing banter, along with footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping onto the Moon.
There were no external descent cameras on the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), so a big chunk of the broadcast uses a timed animation to indicate when the LEM landed. It’s actually off slightly because Armstrong had to make a last-minute adjustment during descent. The external camera was deployed after landing, framing the ladder where Armstrong and Aldrin left the capsule. Now, you can experience that moment just like people did in 1969.