Re: A NEO search facility on the moon is a dumb idea, Ed
Yes, the Lunar NEO search paradigm IS impractical, cost ineffective and unnecessary. The mission can readily be done via satellites in GEO or L points. FYI, the rad hardened Pentium CPU for space use becomes available this year. A nice performance upgrade, but still well behind the 1.X GHz ones you can buy from Dell! Point is...plenty of performance to snarf all the data and via lossless compression squirt it down to ground based processing. No need for the billions on a Lunar base. Too bad from a space cadet perspective buy good news for the species. For under $500M we could have a couple scopes in orbit searching for a sneak attack.
-p