I was at a baseball game with my grandfather when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Sea of Tranquility. The game stopped for about 5 minutes of applause and celebration. Then it went on just like before. My grandfather was born months before the Wright Brothers spent a day in North Carolina taking turns flying their machine, and he lived to witness people flying to a different world.

Back in 1969 this was a big deal. In less than a decade from President Kennedy’s challenge, Americans accomplished a technological feat that is arguably still the greatest such feat ever accomplished. But things have gone on like before. Now the Apollo astronauts are in their 70s. There are always people in orbit around the earth. The moon has been unvisited for nearly 35 years.

In the Shadow of the Moon allows the Apollo astronauts to tell their story once more. These few men who have looked back at the earth from the surface of another world are in some ways now artifacts of a bygone era—the space age. But they are the people who lived that time in a way no others have lived it.

Shadow has a structure that has them telling all their stories together. It doesn’t present a chronological history of the Apollo program, rather it tells of each part of the mission, and each person comments about that part as they experienced it on their flights. They tell their stories with humor and with a sense of awe at what they were a part of and where they have been. It makes the film far more personal than a mere recounting of history.

They also reflect about the spiritual nature of their journey. For some it is explicitly Christian, for some there is a more deistic or humanistic mood. They have a unique perspective from having looked at the planet from afar, but also from returning home and knowing that what they did marked an achievement that was not merely personal or national, but for all of humanity.

For people old enough to have been at a ballgame that day in 1969, this has a high degree of nostalgia. It’s fun to look back at the events we remember and celebrated. (Of course, by the time of the last Apollo mission in 1972, it was already becoming a tad humdrum.) Then the world went on with other issues.

I wonder how those who aren’t old enough to remember these events will view this film. Will they be able to tap into the excitement that Apollo represented to America—and the whole world? Will it merely be a history lesson—the stories of old men about something that doesn’t seem to matter anymore? After all, the world has gone on.

But sometimes it is good to pause and look back. To remember a time when all the world looked together at the moon and said “We made it.”

These few men who walked on the dusty surface of the moon could see the world for what it is—a single planet hanging in space. If we listen to their story, perhaps we can find again that sense of unity that they brought to all humanity for just a moment.