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Lunar landing pads will have to keep people and equipment from being sandblasted by moon dust and particles traveling at more than 10,000 miles per hour as a rocket takes off or lands [ucf.edu]:

Establishing a moon base will be critical for the U.S. in the new space race and building safe and cost-effective landing pads for spacecraft to touch down there will be key.

These pads will have to stop lunar dust and particles from sandblasting everything around them at more than 10,000 miles per hour as a rocket takes off or lands since there is no air to slow the rocket plume down.

However, how to build these landing pads is not so clear, as hauling materials and heavy equipment more than 230,000 miles into space quickly becomes cost prohibitive.

That's why University of Central Florida researchers are working on a NASA-funded project to find ways to build lunar landing pads that keep people and equipment safe but are also economical and easy to construct in space. The work is led by defense and space manufacturing company Cislune and includes research from Arizona State University.

[...] Based on an analysis of four different construction methods, including different combinations for inner and outer landing pad rings, a melting — or sintering— method using microwaves was found to be the most cost effective as long as the cost of transportation to the moon remains above $100,000 per kilogram (about $45,000 a pound), according to the new study.

[...] The construction process could be carried out by rovers that would scoop soil, sort it with magnetic fields, layer it back down to the surface, and melt it with microwaves, the researcher says.

The New Space study found that the second-most-cost-effective method when transportation costs are above $100,000 per kilogram would be paver-based landing pads.

Additionally, once transportation costs drop below $100,000 per kilogram, due to economies of scale and rocket reusability, polymer-based landing pads become a more competitive method for constructing the outer part of the landing pad than sintering and pavers.

Each of the methods have trade-offs, such as energy and construction costs, that must be considered, Metzger says.

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