>>12901083it would have been quite an engineering challenge to send out some little drone or rocket with its own little "place the retroreflector down nicely a ~hundred meters away" program. it really was easier in those days to send a man there to place it there, and also drive a rover, hop around and leave all those tracks (also visible on photos from later missions), and shoot a golf drive. designing unmanned probes to do all that in the 60s would have been way more impossible, just from a computing standpoint. heck; the software they used was encoded on core rope memory, which was not only super heavy but also was weaved by little old ladies threading cables through donut-shaped holes. it was completely impractical to code up anything in those days besides the most essential things; beyond that it was cheaper to strap a dude onto the thing instead of hiring 100,000 old ladies to weave your computer out of magnets and cables
