>In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time. Wow, just wo

>In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time. Wow, just wow. That's mind boggling. I actually had no idea. While I get that hindsight is 20/20, it doesn't take too much intuition to realize if you're sharing something worldwide or the rest of the world watched it, you should probably keep the highest quality copy. It's like you filmed Gangnam Style in 8k, downsampled to 720p for YouTube and then threw the original copy away even after you saw the views climbing to 10s of thousands (or in this case, 10s of millions). I've worked in some cash strapped research labs so I get the need to repurpose when budgets are tight but come on. I don't know how expensive the medium was but I would have caused quite a stir about preserving something like this. Hell, I've preserved news broadcasts of work I've been involved with that made it to the news that I have to this day, and that is only significant to me really.