The staging footage was captured because NASA wanted to document the flight process of an unmanned Saturn flight for feedback in case there was a failure for engineers to look at footage to see what went wrong. Cameras were mounted in strategic locations, kicking on at critical moments to document the staging process for less than half a minute. After completion, the light-tight canisters containing the exposed film were jettisoned, dropping to earth with homing beacons and parachutes inside protective heat shields. Air Force C-130 transport planes, towing gigantic nets, recovered the canisters in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
There is a shot of the moon appearing in the window of the capsule. Director Al Reinert says there was no shot available of the moon showing in the window of the command module, so a film crew went down to the Johnson Space Center, pasted a photo of the moon on a hatch cover at the museum, and filmed it to illustrate astronaut Ken Mattingly's description of what he saw in his flight.
In the opening scene, President John F. Kennedy stands at the podium, giving his famous speech about the government's plan for lunar travel at Rice University. In the scene, President Kennedy's voice-over says, "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won and they must be won and used for the progress of all mankind." President Kennedy in actuality, said, "...used for the progress of all people." Director Al Reinert, using creative license, decided to splice President Kennedy's words, dubbing "mankind" over "people", using a part of the President's speech earlier on in his address.
The film was made by freely combining footage and sound recordings from all the Apollo program missions into one continuous narrative, as if it was all happening at one time. When Alan Bean tells Mission Control that to fix the color TV camera he hit it with a hammer, people on the ground can be seen laughing, including a shot of astronaut Dave Scott with his back to a whiteboard. It cuts straight to an astronaut on the moon about to do the famous Galileo experiment where he drops a hammer and a feather in a vacuum to show that they fall at the same rate. That astronaut was the same Dave Scott who had just been seen in Mission Control. In fact Bean's and Scott's missions, Apollos 12 and 15, respectively, were separated by nearly two years.
This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #54.