[taxesareforever]

The Soviets landed two rovers on the moon, called Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2, on the Luna 17 and Luna 21 missions in 1970 and 1973, respectively. These rovers were equipped with small retroreflector arrays each consisting of 14 corner cubes of triangular configuration (not cut into a circle—imagine slicing off the corner of a cube with a knife).

This from your source. So what makes you believe we also couldn't have put them on the moon without the help of astronauts? The Russians didn't need people on the moon to install theirs.

[RightWhale]

Forget it. They landed.

[Charles Martel]

So what makes you believe we also couldn't have put them on the moon without the help of astronauts? The Russians didn't need people on the moon to install theirs.

Speaking of the Russians, a faked moon landing is one of those things that the Soviets would've loved to rub our noses in - if only they had a suspicion that we'd tried to win the Space Race by cheating. They monitored our comms between the spacecraft and Houston carefully, yet, no complaints.

The level of technical wizardry which you attribute to NASA makes one thing plain: it would be cheaper and easier just to go ahead and send up a manned flight.