Where are Pink Floyd and Neil Armstrong when you need them?

They're the two missing elements from David Sington's "In the Shadow of the Moon" -- the only things that keep it from being a perfect documentary. But we'll happily settle for 98 percent.

Only 12 men have ever stood on the surface of a celestial body other than our own Earth. They went as part of the Apollo program between 1968-72, and this documentary reacquaints us with the astronauts and their missions.

---

'In the Shadow of the Moon'

• Director: David Sington.
• Rating: PG for mild language, brief violent images and incidental smoking.
• Web site: intheshadowofthemoon.com

---

The 480,000-mile round trip they had in common was taken in a cramped capsule whose electrical wiring had killed three of their colleagues on a test pad. The rockets that propelled the capsules had a periodic tendency to blow up. There was no guarantee that they'd land where they wanted to on the moon, or that they'd safely get off it. Yet six of the seven missions were indeed "accomplished," and the aborted one, Apollo 13, turned out to be a masterpiece of save-the-day ingenuity.

Director Sington starts out with mesmerizing footage of John F. Kennedy pledging to make the lunar conquest by the end of the 1960s. Thereafter, he treats us to a treasure trove of archival footage from NASA's original film cans. Much of it has never been seen before. All of it has been restored to sharp audiovisual perfection.

No. 1 talker is the wonderfully articulate Mike Collins (Apollo 11), followed by self-deprecating Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11) -- on and off Tranquility Base. Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt shed complementary light on their own missions.

You can't watch the fiery snowflakes from the rocket-separation stage -- like molten steel, pouring back in Pittsburgh -- without getting chills up the spine. Nor can you fail to grieve for the loss of three astronauts in the fatal 1967 launch-pad flash fire.

Armstrong is reclusive. Pink Floyd probably tried to charge too much for "The Dark Side of the Moon" music from "Brain Damage." But the other astronauts fill in just fine for Neil, and Philip Sheppard's excellently subdued score suffices nicely for Floyd.

This beautiful production reinvents the whole ecstatic experience for those who lived through it, and serves as an excellent primer for younger people who did not. The audacity of it! The human-spiritual epiphany!

I love the final claimer (as opposed to disclaimer) in the credits: "Shot entirely on location on Earth, in Space and on the Moon."

No special F/X here, kids. None needed.

Opens in Pittsburgh at the SouthSide Works and Squirrel Hill theaters