In 1976, an engineering student named Gary George purchased a collection of magnetic tapes at a government surplus sale for about 185 euros. These tapes, originally intended for reuse by local television stations, included three reels that would later be revealed to contain the only known intact recordings of the first steps on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Thirty-two years later, these tapes were sold at auction for 1.6 million euros, making them one of the most valuable pieces of space history ever auctioned. The three original reels from the Apollo 11 mission were auctioned on July 20, 2019, by the auction house Sotheby's. The event, which featured the original recordings of the historic lunar landing, saw intense bidding that lasted nearly five minutes—far exceeding the initial estimates. The final buyer remained anonymous, and the sale price was reported to be 8,000 times the original amount paid by Gary George in 1976. According to Science et Vie, the original lot had cost only 217.77 dollars at the time. The story began in June 1976, when Gary George, then an engineering student who had completed an internship at the Houston Space Center, attended a sale at Ellington Air Force Base. He purchased around 1,150 reels of magnetic tape for 217.77 dollars—equivalent to about 185 euros at the time. At that point, each new reel of tape cost about 260 dollars, making the entire lot a bargain. These tapes were meant to be reused by local TV stations to cut costs. Gary's father later noticed three boxes marked "APOLLO 11 EVA, July 20, 1969" and placed them in a box, which Gary then forgot about for over three decades. NASA had recorded the lunar landing on 5-centimeter wide magnetic tapes, but after the mission, it re-recorded over its own archives, losing the originals. The tapes found by Gary George showed the first step on the Moon as seen by the control center in Houston. No other copy of this quality had survived, not even in NASA's own archives. The agency had been searching for these recordings since 2008, near the fortieth anniversary of the mission, but had failed to find any reels. A chance meeting with a NASA video engineer at a ski club in 2008 led Gary to recontact his former employer, but the two sides could not agree on the reels' fate. Eventually, David Crosthwait, a video archivist in Burbank, used machines capable of reading the old format to view the reels in October 2008. The tapes, dormant since 1969, were found to be in perfect condition, offering a clearer image of the historic event than any other known copy. In December 2008, the recordings were digitized onto a one-terabyte hard drive and later sold along with the original reels during the 2019 auction.