Fifty years ago this July, the Apollo 11 mission to the moon made history—and audio engineers were there to capture its dizzying array of sounds. As Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins made their way to the moon and back, these engineers worked around the clock to make their own high-quality recording of the transmissions, which were later edited into Sounds of the Space Age, a vinyl record insert included with 6.5 million issues of the December 1969 issue of National Geographic magazine.

The record—just the second the magazine had ever included—provides a brisk 11-minute audio summary of the space race, from the groundbreaking chirps of the Soviet satellite Sputnik to Armstrong and Aldrin’s conversations on the