How could NASA lose this???

Neil Armstrong vanishes into the ozone

NASA recently announced it had lost the original recording of Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

A NASA spokesman said the tape was part of 700 boxes of missing tape from all Apollo missions. And, worse, he said the agency had no clear paper trail on the Apollo 11 tape since the late 1970s.

Plus, it doesn’t sound like NASA knows for sure if or when it made either tape backups, or later, digital ones, of any of this equipment.

Wunderbar.

Also, why isn’t the original tape, or at least a very good copy, in the Smithsonian?