A failure upon impact at 2.68 km/s cold not prove anything, only an actual landing of an unmanned probe could. I am surprised, actually, that NASA gave the green light to the Apollo 11 mission without trying to send an exact copy of the lander on an unmanned landing mission first and, instead, simply trusted the information obtained by the Soviets who landed a probe of a completely different design and who, I am sure, were not eager to share with NASA all the details of how things went.

Other things aside, it just seems that NASA and the media make it all too easy to forget that it was the Soviets who made a major contribution to this success by having landed their Luna 10 there three years earlier and thus proving that it was physically possible to land on the Moon's surface at all. I wonder if the US would send people to the Moon without being reasonably sure if the surface was firm enough to support a lander.

Here is the complete timeline of the Luna missions: Luna Missions.

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