THIS month marked the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 — the first successful moon landing. A great deal of coverage focused on the three male astronauts who set foot on the moon, but the work to get them there  required hundreds of thousands of people.

Todd Douglas Miller’s new documentary about the events, Apollo 11, uses newly discovered 70mm film from the Nasa archives to tell this story of collective achievement.

Rather than simply showing us Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins throughout the eight-day mission, Miller includes detailed footage of the Nasa employees working on the ground to make sure the mission succeeded.

We see the the banks of flight controllers in Houston working in front of terminals, the engineers making last-minute repairs to the rocket before they set off, and the technicians monitoring their vital signs.

As well as making the mission possible, the meticulous recording of the events by these ordinary people overshadowed by the three central figures is ultimately what makes the documentary possible.

Miller and his team, including Sheffield archivist Stephen Slater, have reunited soundless video footage with the continuous 30-track audio from the mission, weaving it together into a thrilling story.

The moon landings have been called the greatest achievement of Soviet science. It’s widely agreed that without the intense pressure of the early successes of the USSR, such as Yuri Gagarin’s first journey into space in 1961, the US would never have embarked on the Apollo programme.

In JFK’s famous speech that set out the ambition to go to the moon, he admitted: “To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind.”

Ironically, for a programme that was meant to demonstrate the superiority of US capitalist society, the Apollo programme was the quintessential state-backed juggernaut.

It cost $25.4 billion (the equivalent of $153bn today) and at its peak employed over 400,000 people.

While the lunar landing was of questionable scientific value, the symbolic nature of the events has made it a popular analogy for highly technical prowess.

Boris Johnson’s suggestion that Brexit was like the lunar landings could have been influenced by his new special adviser, Dominic Cummings; in 2017, Cummings wrote a document outlining “the core lessons of systems management” from the Apollo programme that he believes should be “applied to re-engineering political institutions such as Downing Street.”

Symbolism and management aside, the technological achievements of Apollo are still inspiring today.

One of the most exciting moments in the new documentary is the descent of the lunar module to the moon’s surface. With just four minutes of fuel available for the descent, the documentary presents an unbroken shot from the bottom of the lunar module.

The moon’s surface, at first grainy and blurred, gets closer and closer as the height counts down. Suddenly, an error code from the computer flashes up onto the screen in harsh red: a code 1201.

Armstrong has no idea what it means — could it be a fatal error? — and has to ask mission control.

They don’t explain, but simply tell him to continue with the landing. With a tense last-minute rejigging of the landing site to avoid the edge of a crater, the module lands with just seconds of fuel remaining.

What was the error code, and why were mission control confident to ignore it? Code 1201 meant that the computer had run out of memory, and couldn’t physically perform all the tasks it was being asked simultaneously.

The total “erasable memory” — or RAM as it is now commonly known — available to the lunar module’s computer was 2048 15-bit “words” (sets of locations in computer memory). For context, this is about 0.0003 per cent of the RAM of a typical smartphone in 2019 (at least 1 gigabyte).

These constraints meant that if too much memory was requested, the lunar module’s computer would crash.

Anyone who has attempted to fire up too many apps on their smartphone and had it freeze will be familiar with this problem.

If this situation hadn’t been anticipated, the astronaut’s computer would have left them approaching the lunar surface without computing power. However, Nasa computer programmers were aware this could happen.

As Margaret Hamilton, the leader of the flight software team, explained in an interview with The Guardian recently, she had realised this could be a problem when she brought her daughter to work.

Her daughter pressed lots of buttons simultaneously during a spacecraft simulation, causing a memory overflow: “The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God — this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.”

To deal with this problem of limited memory resources, the Nasa programmers developed “a real-time multi-tasking operating system” similar to modern systems, which ranked computing tasks by priority.

If the memory limits were breached, the computer would reboot itself, and only restart the most important jobs.

A “1201 memory overflow” did occur during the lunar descent — after the mission, the team worked out that this was due to a radar switch being in the wrong position.

However, the computer correctly restarted and ignored the less important tasks, restoring the essential calculations like steering the engine to the lunar surface and saving the astronauts’ lives.

Like the Apollo guidance computer, we seem to have very limited collective memory. In the history of science, it’s common for the achievements and contributions of women such as Margaret Hamilton and her team to be forgotten, erased by repetition of the usual stories about lone scientific male genius.

It’s also easy for us to forget that scientific achievements of all sorts are funded by vast amounts of public money, even in our capitalist system.

We — all of us — make these achievements possible. And we are responsible for how they are used. As an unelected prime minister’s unaccountable adviser contemplates how to “re-engineer” the British state, let’s not forget: it belongs to all of us.