"passive instrument"
My thoughts too. The McDonald Observatory has been spending over $100K a year doing ranging experiments?
Fine, axe that, but the reporter of the article made it sound wrong.

And the mirror's presence on the Moon doesn't faze the hoax believers a bit. They were placed by robotic landers, don't you know...
(Not to mention all the RF telemetry that went on while the missions weere being simulcast from the studio, that had to be sent from the vicinity of the Moon to fool the USSR. So we didn't have tech to send people, but we faked all of that with robotics in the '60s...)