So, land as few times as possible to carry what's needed to build a landing platform?
Conversely, blowing an engine nearly horizontal to the surface is going to shut off the Moon for a while. That's a weapon.
Conversely, blowing an engine nearly horizontal to the surface is going to shut off the Moon for a while. That's a weapon.
I doubt that objects put in "orbit" with a periapsis of almost zero (launched from the ground) would stay in flight for too long.
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-apollo-ascent-stage-orbiting-m...
Is it in any way more practical weapon than just lobbing stuff?
Kessler is a chain reaction. Destruction is caused by secondary effects, i.e. bits of satellites the primary projectile broke hitting targets. This is closer to an area denial weapon: the destruction is caused directly by the debris blown off the surface.
Therefore, the logical thing to do is to put it on the correct side of a mountain, to shield the engine. But that would also collect all the debris. So it would generally only be in orbit for one orbit.
That makes it more targeted than some of the other unfriendly things you can do in an airless planetary environment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35862424
(To be honest, I think on any planetary body without an atmosphere, long term everyone is going to have to dig in to the planet, and to a non-trivial degree, too, not least of which is the complete indefensibility of surface installations.)
However, that will dissipate quickly and you'll certainly be looking at a set of orbits that all pass through something relatively close to the origin. They're not going to be interacting for the first time a quarter of the way through the orbit and bouncing around a lot there.
So Kessler syndrome could certainly develop for a whiley but would be cleaned up rather quickly as all the pulling & pushing of the "rough" gravity converts the orbital speed into heat, until all the fragments impact the surface.
Might be a bit more dangerous on the surface for a while though, with lot of stuff striking it at near orbital speed in an almost horizontal direction. That could ruin your evening stroll quite badly.
In comparison, there is likely still stuff from the 60s in orbit around Mars, and that's for a body with (thin) atmosphere.
That can be a while if you near the escape velocity, still a slim chance to hit anything.
There's a huge gap in hit probability between "dangerous enough to consider safety" and "good enough to be a weapon".
The odds that a sufficient fraction of particles would remain in orbit for long enough to make routine operations in low lunar orbit or on the surface itself seems ... plausible.
And of course, the situation could be compounded by multiple burns and/or at multiple points on the surface, at a somewhat increased cost to the attacker.