....
"...The first successful tests were carried out in 1962 when a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology succeeded in observing laser pulses reflected from the Moon's surface using a laser with a millisecond pulse length..." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experimentSpendy, how do you explain this contradiction? They were bouncing lasers off the Moon almost a decade before the first Moon landing hoax.
It's not a contradiction. The retro reflector is highly monochromatic and has a distinctive signature on the photon returns. It is perhaps a thousand times more sensitive than bouncing off the surface.
"The surface" varies greatly in it's distance from Earth, because of lunar hills and valleys. The reflector allows accurate distance measurement down to about 1.5 inches.