First of all, the honest effort wasn't by any means a ruse nor a
sting, though if it happened the way it was reported, the data
returned was simply woefully insufficient and, those thoroughly TBI
astronauts didn't lose one hair, let alone require any banked bone
marrow, even though their moon boots were cm deep into the basalt soil
and rock where secondary radiation (hard X-Rays) doesn't get any
worse.

BTW: nearly 70,000 km worth of the Van Allen zone of death is
reasonably difficult to circumvent, especially if your trajectory is
lunar bound. At an average pass-through of perhaps at best 8 km/s is
at the very least 2.4 hours each way, if not more likely 3.5+ hours
each way due somewhat to the angular path. Much faster and they could
have missed the moon as well as for returning to Earth, as for the
amounts of breaking thrust and fuel simply wasn't there. It's true
that only about 25% of the Van Allen zone is worth avoiding like the
plague, but that's still 1.5 hours worth of being where it's just
about as nasty as such things get.

There's so much solar illuminated surface radiation (direct influx of
solar as well as cosmic plus subsequently loads of secondary) that of
any notion for biological decontamination was a ruse, buying essential
time in order to orchestrate the fact that we didn't have all the
right stuff, at least not at that time.

Actually our optics of today, digital stacking and all (including
Hubble) can accumulate and thereby pull less than 1 meter raw
resolution, then photoshop upon all of that for another 10 fold
improvement (that's 10 cm or better), though no longer raw, those
combined new pixels are certainly good enough for NIMA as well as NASA
certified geologist. VLA/SAR is yet another modern solution that's
been worth obtaining less than 1 meter, as of a decade ago even that
non-stacking method was offering a raw 4 meter resolution capability.

Here's yet another pathetic example of a typical NASA study running
amuck.

Processing Glass Fiber from Moon/Mars Resources (1990)
Dr. Dennis S. Tucker and Edwin C. Ethridge
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/space98pdf/fiber.pdf

Conclusions
"It was concluded from this study that lunar simulants MLS-1 and MLS-2
in the as-received state were unsuitable for producing continuous
glass fibers with the present capabilities."

Did you happen to notice the word "simulants" as in the fact that not
even from all of those supposed moon rocks, of which NASA retains the
vast bulk inventory of, did their very own research have samples of
the real stuff.

On top of there being just about anything robotic capable of
delivering those retroreflectors, trust me folks, the surface of the
moon itself (mostly dark basalt plus loads of sturine meteorites like
those within the Mars images, except more of them), being that most
modern lasers illuminate a diameter of 2 km worth, this much surface
area far outperforms even 100 m2 worth of said retroreflectors, as
simple photon math using the piss poor reflection of merely 10% will
prove this out. With a target zone of 3.14^6 m2 and a pathetic
refraction of merely 0.0001% should do just fine and dandy.

Unfortunately, the sorts of multi-million dollar infomercials that our
NASA puts over, commanding multiple publications and of those terrific
NOVA productions are in fact super terrific at snookering most nice
folks into believing in almost anything, like the ESE fiasco being
remotely feasible is almost as doable as Zubrin's Mars or bust fiasco.
Meanwhile we've got absolutely nothing whatsoever interactive that's
reporting data back from the moon.

For your entertainment sake, I've added another page (GV-LM-1) and
edited upon a couple of others:

If I were to be suggesting upon wild and crazy things, as if this is
what makes life worth living, especially if they're to be horrifically
spendy and somewhat lethal, in that case I've got lots to say about
utilizing the moon as well as Venus.
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-lm-1.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-cm-ccm-01.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/space-radiation-103.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/earth-moon-energy.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-lse-energy.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/vl2-iss-joke.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-illumination.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/moon-sar.htm
http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-town.htm
plus a few dozen other pages.