Two issues with the article.  It is my understanding that the lost tapes are raw data feed S-band recordings.  That signal contained both the TV signal and the telemetry which was normally sent via S-band.  Upon reception the TV signal was split from the telemetry and recorded to standard TV tape and broadcasted using a Telecine like method.  So, the &quot;original&quot; TV recordings do exist, as the existence of restored recordings suggest.  What is gone is the telemetry mixed with the TV signal.<p>Secondly, they didn&#x27;t erase those tapes because of money savings, or at least not just because of it.  It was a supply issue.  In the late &#x27;70s, early &#x27;80s, the manufacturer of those tapes suffered production problems due to the replacement of a substance used in the tapes, if I remember correctly it was whale oil or something like that.  The production needed to be scaled back up with the new process, and in that time there was a severe shortage of that particular type of data tape, so NASA had to recycle old tapes.