NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said yesterday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so it could reuse the videotape.

But Hollywood is coming to the rescue. The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.

NASA yesterday released some of the reworked video from the July 20, 1969, live television broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the mission.

The release, part of a larger Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project, features 15 key moments from the historic lunar excursion of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

"The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video," said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11.

The $230,000 restoration project is expected to be completed in September, Nafzger said. He praised the restored work for its crispness. The restoration company, Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., also refurbished Star Wars and James Bond films, and "Casablanca."

Of all the video the company has dealt with, Lowry president Mike Inchalik said, "this is by far and away the lowest quality."

The black-and-white images of Armstrong and Aldrin bounding around the moon were taken by a single small video camera on the lunar module. The camera used a nonstandard scan format that commercial TV couldn't broadcast, and the conversion degraded the quality of what viewers saw.