On July 20.1969.....

Now officially, if you reached that point and
weren't actually on the ground yet, you were supposed to abort --
otherwise you lost your escape route -- but in practice, most of the
Apollo CDRs would probably have said "don't bother me, I'm busy landing"
and carried on to touchdown.



We're talking about a surface that no one was familiar with.

Not totally unfamiliar, in that a few surveyor landing moon
probes (and some of the Russian probes) demonstrated that the
lunar surface could in fact support spacecraft. There was some
concern that that Moon might be covered by a thick layer of fluff.

But Neil had to hunt around some to find a clear spot without
big rocks to land on.

How bad a landing could the LM take and still have a flyable
ascent stage? Say the legs got busted up so forget about the
moon walks.