In several lunar landing missions that took place between July 20, 1969, and Dec. 14, 1972, 12 American men walked on the moon.

Quick!

Name one besides Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on our closest heavenly body.

Oddly, considering that these men had made such moon-shattering voyages, they remain largely anonymous.

Documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Roth sets out to change all that in The Wonder of It All, being shown at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Columbus Theater as part of the 11th Rhode Island International Film Festival. Roth conducted on-screen interviews with seven of the dozen moon-walking astronauts in his compelling film in which they discuss everything from weightlessness to the sight of a tiny Earth hovering above them to meetings with doubters who wonder whether they had really set foot on the moon at all.

Roth gives a bit of history up front, how the U.S. space program was put into high gear by President John F. Kennedy in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, the first man-made satellite that began sending out its beeping signal as it orbited Earth in 1957. In 1961, Kennedy challenged America to get to the moon before the decade was out. By golly, we did it when Armstrong put his foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. But by then it was a time of unrest in the United States: civil rights, student protests and the Vietnam War looming larger and larger. Buzz Aldrin, who was on that first lunar landing mission with Armstrong, remembers going to Wisconsin to receive an award for his historic journey and being pelted by eggs from students who saw him as a representative of The Establishment.

But there are happier memories, too. Alan Bean recalls seeing fellow astronaut Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball in the moon’s gravity field that is one-sixth of Earth’s.

Harrison Schmitt, who went on to be a Congressman, says he was surprised at how black the sky is — “blacker than black.” Schmitt doesn’t see himself as a modern-day Christopher Columbus, however, but more like the early 19th-century explorers Lewis and Clark. “We knew where we were going and the risks involved,” he says.

That statement may explain why most of these men are all but forgotten. They were part of a team effort and not people who hatched plans to go to the moon on their own. “Did we want to be heroes? No, I don’t think so,” says one.

Most, we learn from The Wonder of It All, started out wanting to fly airplanes faster and higher; the space program was something that just came along. Schmitt says he wanted to be a forest ranger whose later plans were influenced by seeing Sputnik sail across the night sky of North America in 1957.

Today, most of them seem to be just ordinary, middle-class, beyond-middle-age Americans.

Some are burdened with personal demons. Aldrin talks about his mother’s suicide the year before he went to the moon and about his own depression that led to alcoholism.

Others have had their lives changed by their moon walks. Bean shows off some of his paintings, most of them with moon-landing themes. Eugene Cernan says it “was not a religious experience, but a spiritual experience.” Edgar Mitchell felt he had an epiphany of spirituality as he touched down and lectures on it.

Roth has used old family photos, archival films and shots of liftoffs and moon walks to tell his story.

Although he identifies each man with an on-screen tagline up front, this idea is abandoned for long stretches in the middle of The Wonder of It All, as though we are supposed to remember who is who every time they pop back on screen. Fortunately, the identifying taglines begin reappearing later in the film, although not all the time, which is unfortunate.

Although much of The Wonder of It All consists of talking heads, it never lags and is always interesting. These astronauts, after all, are ordinary people who have done something very extraordinary.

mjanuson@projo.com