It’s the machines of clunky metal. Clunky metal husks. And the yellowed lined ledger paper. Humanity went to the moon on this. Armstrong had to jot down calculations with a pen on chart paper while in orbit in Gemini 8, his first trip to space. It all looks so antiquated now, which director Damien Chazelle takes care to show us.

“We only started flying sixty years ago,” justifies Neil Armstrong to a congressman who queries NASA spending and delays. What do you expect? Great leaps demand great investment. By the time Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, it had still only been sixty-six years since the Wright Brothers first flew.

It bears remembering that for all the high-tech of space flight, these voyages were dangerous longshots. Rickety ships crossing great expanses with no certainty of destination, much less return. The longer we go without returning to the moon, the more credible those fake moon landing theories also seem.