It was a suicide mission. A computer with all the power of a Hershey Bar controlling a mission with a lander that had never actually been flown because it couldn't have been, sheesh! These guys should be dessicated skeletons floating around the sun by now.
But the biggest question is why risk killing or even worse, stranding, guys on the surface of the moon watching them die. The Soviets would have had the upper hand and America would have been criticized by the rest of the world for RUSHING into space with no safeguards etc., etc. Talk about a throw of the dice.
Yes, I definitely lived through that period. Even had “the moon rock” spend a couple of nights in my home when I was in late elementary school (dad’s job involved escorting Neil Armstrong around for a few days, while he was on his international victory tour with the moon rock).
Looking back on it now, it seems insane to have undertaken such a venture with the primitive computers that were state of the art then (so primitive that it was still much easier to do calculations on a slide rule, as demonstrated so well in the historically accurate movie Apollo 13). But our technology didn’t seem primitive to us at the time, of course, just as the technology we have now doesn’t seem primitive to us now (our grandchildren will no doubt giggle over the giant, glitch-prone boxes we currently think of as our very advanced computers). Forging ahead with optimistic confidence is responsible for most of the worthwhile achievements of the human species.