NASA is gearing up for fresh efforts to find the original footage of the historic Apollo moon walk, which has gone missing, the official in charge said on Tuesday.

Richard Nafzger, a senior engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the videos were not lost, but just couldn't be found right now.

However, the search had began before Tuesday and an official search was ordered on Tuesday since NASA now wanted data for its new lunar missions.

The work is to find the 15 reels, or three boxes, for Apollo 11's stay on the moon, among 2,000 and more boxes of tapes, said Stan Lebar, a retired Apollo television camera manager. Everything from all of the 11 missions is on the tapes, he added.

It is most likely that the tapes are stored at Goddard.

The original video, taken directly from the moon and beamed to deep space network observatories in Australia, has never been seen by the world barring a few technicians, Lebar said.

The video carry images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon with a far better viewing quality than what the world watched on television in 1969, according to Nafzger.

Once the videos are found, they will be specially preserved before being viewed, Nafzger added.

Source: Xinhua