It was one of Man’s finest moments, the fulfilment of a $24 billion vision spelt out by President Kennedy seven years earlier as “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”.

And yesterday, in a giant step for video entertainment if not recorded history, we were able to see the images of that momentous achievement as they had never been seen before.

Nasa released restored footage of the original landings that picked out details that were missing from the initial broadcasts.

The excerpts showed startlingly refreshed images without the fuzziness of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin skipping across the Moon and planting the US flag.

Times Archive 1969 Man takes first steps on the moon

The spectacular moment came at 3.56 am: "That's one small step for man but one giant leap for mankind"

• Topic: Men on the Moon

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For the first time there was a visible reflection of the lunar surface in Mr Armstrong’s visor.

The improved quality is the result of $230,000 (£140,000) that Nasa spent having the images restored by Lowry Digital Corporation, a Hollywood film company that has previously enhanced classics including Casablanca and Singing in the Rain.

Nasa admitted that it could have been even better had it not made an error with the tapes and recorded over some of the original broadcast data that mission control received.

When it commemorated the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission — an event that will culminate in a rare reunion of Mr Armstrong, Mr Aldrin and their crewmate Michael Collins at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington on Sunday — the US space agency admitted the mistake.

One might have expected Nasa to save the source tapes after Mr Armstrong and Mr Aldrin recorded their history-making feat on a single camera. The mystery of the tapes’ whereabouts has been an embarrassment for years.

After three years of rifling in cupboards, scuffling in archives worldwide and interviewing hundreds of people, the original magnetic tapes on which the historic Moon walk was recorded were not just lost, Nasa concluded, they were completely erased.

In a case of overenthusiastic recycling, or cost cutting, the tapes were scrubbed to allow technicians to record satellite data over the top.

“The question is, why didn’t someone just look at these and say ‘They’re something special’? Boy, don’t we wish someone had done that,” said Dick Nafzger, a television specialist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who helped to make the recordings in 1969 and led the subsequent search team in 2006.

“We should have had a historian running around saying ‘I don’t care if you want to use the tapes for something else, we’ve got to keep them’.”

The error centred on so-called “slow scan” telemetric data that was downlinked to Earth from a camera mounted on the lunar module.

That data was picked up by radio telescopes in Australia and the Mojave Desert in the US, converted into a standard television signal and beamed by microwave and satellite to Mission Control in Houston, where it was projected on to a screen on the wall.

A television camera was pointed at the screen to transmit the imagery to the 500 million people watching around the world. Because it was a copy of a copy the footage was substantially below par.

When the newly enhanced surviving footage is released in full it is sure to pay back the investment made in improving it when it becomes part of a package of commemorative Apollo 11 goods that have been released on to the market.

Nasa released the text of an interview with Mr Collins yesterday in which he shrugged off the adulation that he and his crewmates have attracted in the past 40 years.

“Heroes abound, and should be revered as such, but don’t count astronauts among them. We work very hard; we did our jobs to near perfection, but that was what we had hired on to do. In no way did we meet the criterion of the Congressional Medal of Honor: ‘Above and beyond the call of duty’,” he said.

“We survived hazardous careers and we were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 per cent shrewd planning and 90 per cent blind luck. Put ‘Lucky’ on my tombstone.”

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