Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings of the Moon landing really is. The NASA-independent "Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur", McDonald, Apache Point, and Haleakalā observatories regularly use the Apollo LRRR. Lick Observatory attempted to detect from Apollo 11's retroreflector while Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the Moon but did not succeed until August 1, 1969. The Apollo 14 astronauts deployed a retroreflector on February 5, 1971, and McDonald Observatory detected it the same day. The Apollo 15 retroreflector was deployed on July 31, 1971, and was detected by McDonald Observatory within a few days. The image on the left shows what is considered some of
Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings was unknown for nearly 40 years but it was rediscovered in 2010 in photographs by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and its retroreflector is now in use. Both the United States and the USSR had the capability to soft-land objects on the surface of the Moon for several years before that. The USSR successfully landed its first unmanned probe (Luna 9) on the Moon in February 1966, and the United States followed with Surveyor 1 in June 1966, but no unmanned landers carried retroreflectors before Lunokhod 1 in November 1970. Post-Apollo lunar exploration missions have located and imaged artifacts of