Is that back in the day of Dyna-Soar. MOL (not MOLE), and all those
other early military-based space projects is that computers will still very
big, very bulky, hard to use, and often unreliable (all those vacuum tubes
blowing out and such). See my recent post on the Apollo Guidance
Computer described in the book Digital Apollo for an example of just how
simple and relatively primitive computers were even by the late 1960s.

Anyone who truly understood a computer in those days would not have
trusted them nearly as much as a military-trained person in orbit. Plus
we were still learning a lot about space and living in it.

And of course having an actual person of one's nation in a spacecraft
circling Earth would make a far greater impact geopolitically than any
old machine up there. That's why we just celebrated the 40th anniversary
of Apollo 11 and not, say, Luna 9 or Surveyor 1 or Venera 7 at anywhere
near the same level, despite their historic importance to our exploration
and understanding of the local Universe.

So go easy on those old guys who wanted people up there. Having a
ready-made "wet" computer which could take and understand orders
and carry them out quickly was far more desirable than trusting the
same to a mindless automaton, which most computers still are.

That will probably change some day I am sure, where we will have robots
will incredible flexibility with minds that at the least can imitate human
style thought, but that won't be for a while. But then again, cell phones
and lap tops with megagigabites of storage weren't supposed to be for
a while, either.