You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%.
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
> you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets.
Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.
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> lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot
Rough estimates? Mass drivers make sense. I haven’t seen the numbers for just compressing and leveling regolith.