Are You Flying a "Beater?"

In article ,
"Bill Denton" wrote:

There is a generally accepted distance between Earth and the moon (roughly a
quarter of a million miles). This would generally be described as a "fact".
But no one has ever taken a ruler and actually measured that distance.


One of the Apollo missions left a special prism like mirror set up on
the moon. They then bounced a laser off of it from Earth and were able
to measure the distance with extreme accuracy ( have to look it up but
memory says within a millimeter or so) ... at least the distance at that
particular moment in time (not a perfect circular orbit).


Edward