It was my wife's first (and probably only) 😛 appearance on Mythbusters. Apparently they had heard of lasers being bounced off the retroreflectors and were interested in building their own telescope and laser bounce system.

Needless to say, not a very viable concept. 😀 I don't know how much it cost to build the telescope and observatory, but I think the mirror by itself represents a million dollars US. It also takes over a year to get a mirror made when you're looking at that size.

Somehow they called the observatory and eventually ended up taping there.

The observatory is owned by a consortium of universities and managed by New Mexico State. Each university pays X dollars and gets Y time on the sky scheduled, but there's frequent loss of nights due to weather or equipment problems. The observatory is over 10 years old since "first light", I don't know how long it took to build out.

The APOLLO laser is mainly a UCSD project, but University of Washington and Harvard are also involved along with NASA and Space Command (my wife regularly emails with a military guy whose job title is Space Battle Commander).

You might be able to find the segment on the Discovery Channel web site, but I couldn't in the limited amount of time that I had to look. I know the segment was on YouTube, they used to have it linked on the observatory's web site, but it doesn't seem to be up right now.