It was only in the late 1960's, with the birth of the NASA Apollo project for landing an astronaut safely on the moon, that the concept of laser ranging to a lunar surface corner retroreflector package became a reality. The first deployment of such a package on the lunar surface took place during the Apollo 11 mission in the summer of 1969 and lunar laser ranging (LLR) became a reality [Bender et al., 1973]. Additional retroreflector packages were landed on the lunar surface by NASA during the Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 missions. Two French-built retroreflector packages were soft-landed on the lunar surface by Soviet landers [Barker et al., 1975].
For historical completeness, it should be mentioned that the very first lunar laser ranging observations of the Apollo 11 retroreflector package were made with the 3.1-m telescope at Lick Observatory [Faller et al., 1969]. However, the ranging system at Lick was designed solely for quick acquisition and confirmation, rather than for an extended program. In those very early days, successful lunar laser range measurements were also reported by the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories Lunar Ranging Observatory in Arizona [AFCRL, 1969] the Pic du Midi Observatory in France [Calame et al., 1970] and the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory [Kozai, 1972]. Over the past almost 30 years, lunar laser ranging has also been accomplished by stations in Maui, the former Soviet Union, Australia, and Germany. A new lunar capable station is being built by researchers in Italy. However, the only stations to produce these observations in a routine and continuous way are the McDonald station in the United States and the CERGA station in France. A paper describing the early efforts of the CERGA station can be found elsewhere in this volume [Veillet et al., 1993].
