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

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 "original" TV recordings do exist, as the existence of restored recordings suggest. What is gone is the telemetry mixed with the TV signal. Secondly, they didn't erase those tapes because of money savings, or at least not just because of it. It was a supply issue. In the late '70s, early '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.