It's the typical husband/sports fan stereotype - he uses the wedding video tape accidentally to tape some classic football game, the wife finds out years later, sleeping on couch ensues.

But this time it's a government program - NASA - and footage of history in the making that nobody else at the party could have shot.

Is there a collective doghouse for NASA?

NPR reports that an "exhaustive, three-year search for some tapes that contained the original footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk has concluded that they were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data."

You can't really get off with an easy, "Oops, my bad," in this situation. But there's really not a lot NASA can do at this point. "I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong...I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it," says NASA's Dick Nafzger.

What they could do, however, is piece together bits from the original broadcast television footage - this is very poor quality, compared to the raw footage from the lunar camera, but the lunar camera video was recorded in an incompatible format so it had to be converted for earth broadcast.

"The lost tapes mean that the world will probably never again see the original images beamed back to Earth by the lunar camera that is now resting on the moon's dusty Sea of Tranquility, right where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left it."

It's a pretty cool story - check out NPR to read or listen to the report. Also check out the video here - it switches between the original broadcast tape and the digitally restored version so you can see the difference.