blart wrote:
another post got me thinking about aerobraking to a 'soft' landing on the
moon

it may be possible if the soft lander were preceded by a hard impactor that
could excavate a significant amount of ejecta back along its trajectory,
like a shaped charge in reverse...

The escape velocity on the moon isn't really high enough to melt all the
ejecta, which is a really bad thing.

Large nuclear explosions at some standoff distance will release a much
larger volume of gas/... with most of it being in very small particles,
as it's evaporating/condensing.