NASA
On July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, set foot on the moon. The two extraordinary men became the first humans to walk on the moon. Footage of the monumental achievement was recently auctioned off and made one former NASA employee very rich.
We have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing over the last two weeks. But one person is really celebrating the anniversary of the moon landing because they made a killing off selling footage of the lunar achievement.
Gary George, a former NASA intern, had the savvy to splurge on video footage of the Apollo moon landing. Video of the 1969 moon landing, which lasted nearly three hours, was somehow made available at a government surplus auction in 1976.
George decided he must have the historic tapes and spend $217.77 for the reels of the moon walk as well as over 1,000 other NASA recordings. In 2008, George wisely digitized the old reels to have digital copies in case the reels deteriorated.
On Saturday, Gary George auctioned off his one-of-a-kind tapes of the Apollo 11 mission and he made a fortune. The reels were auctioned off through Sotheby’s for $1.82 million. That’s quite the investment for Gary George, getting over an 8,000% return.
The footage features two hours and 24 minutes of action recorded at Mission Control in Houston, Texas. The reels include recordings by the lunar-surface camera that captured Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” moment. The footage also contains the astronauts planting the American flag on the hard lunar surface as well as all of the lunar extravehicular activity (EVA).
According to Sotheby’s, the footage is the “earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man’s first steps on the moon.” The auction house boasted that the audio quality of the tapes is “excellent.”
“Since the camera had to be deployed before [Neil] Armstrong and Aldrin exited the Lunar Module if it was truly going to capture their first steps on the surface of the moon, the camera was stowed in a shock-proof and insulated mount on the LM’s Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly,” Sotheby’s said in the statement. “Armstrong released the MESA when he first peered out of the LM, so that the camera would be in position to capture his slow descent down the ladder and onto the lunar surface. The two astronauts later removed the camera from the LM and mounted it on a tripod to capture a wider view of the LM and their activities and experiments.”
While the footage is much of the same that the entire world has already seen, the NASA versions are the clearest since it was a direct feed and wasn’t sent through numerous microwave towers which decreased picture quality.
Sotheby’s did not release the name of the person who spent the $1.82 million for the historic tapes. That’s quite a video to own, unless the CIA faked the moon landing and it was actually a movie filmed in a Hollywood studio. Then that is not a great way to spend nearly $2 million. Then again, you could just watch the entire Apollo 11 moon landing on YouTube for free.
[CNBC]