[bvod]

Since the tapes were damaged by "moderate to severe mould," it likely would have taken a non insignificant amount of work to convert them to digital format. NASA doesn't want to waste it's engineers' time - this seems more like work for a historical society or organization

[bleair]

Think about how much budget and time and resource and nasa-career-path risk it would take for a manager at Nasa to ask for taking on a restoration project like this. Not going to happen.

[infogulch]

Why would it have to be NASA? I feel like would be a lot of NASA / space historian people that would be interested to try to restore them without charge.