In a 2023 interview with Filmmaker magazine, Colin West spoke in detail about the rocket engine prop and how it was emblematic of the independent nature of the production: "It was a legitimate rocket engine built by NASA. What the characters describe in the movie is exactly what it was: a backup engine made for the Apollo missions which was was never actually used. Its purpose was to be the last engine that gets the actual capsule to the moon and back. A lot of the NASA [equipment] was built in Los Angeles back in the day, so there's still a lot of rocket refuse left over in warehouses in the Valley. Through the years, I've befriended a man named Carlos [Guzman], who runs a place up in the Valley called Norton Sales ["the only prop house in America specializing in vintage aerospace and industrial props from the atomic and space age"] and I've worked with him on a few short films. He has this massive warehouse that's packed with dusty old space crap and I always feel like a kid in a candy store when I visit [laughs]. Carlos knows everything that's stored in there, what it's used for and why. I'll often just go to poke around and have fun.
One of Carlos's all-star pieces is this rocket engine that I asked to use. We talked it through and I was able to [use it]. I ended up buying a box truck here in Los Angeles, packed it with a bunch of rocket stuff from Carlos's warehouse, then drove it across the country to upstate New York by myself where we shot the film. A few months later, I drove all the stuff back in the box truck, dropped it off to Carlos, then sold the truck for about a thousand dollars more than I had originally paid for it. As this was an indie movie, that was the kind of thing that all of our cast and crew were doing. We were trying the best we could to make the film appear as realistic as possible, but in a way that wouldn't require us to buy everything outright. We were begging and borrowing and stealing to make the film happen."