I've worked the funding system, Ed, and I know how the game is played. If they can convince the powers that be that their system is the way to go, then they're guaranteeing themselves lifetime employment and increasing budgets, which is the holy grail of any bureaucracy.

If the impactor threat is as severe as you claim, why would you want to wait for a gilded system that MIGHT be funded and in place 20-40 years from now? A series of space based telescopes could be operational within a few years at a fraction of the cost. Being a collection of satellites, they would have natural redundancy. They also would allow for enhanced tracking options by triangulating the objects with multiple sensors, perhaps in conjunction with a LADIR rangefinder.

You seem oblivious to the basics of space surveillance, Ed, and too stubborn to learn from people who have actually done it. A NEO detection and tracking program requires continuous whole-sky searches. These are done by shooting overlapping images of the entire sky then coming back and repeating the images. The two images of the same piece of sky are then compared with an XOR test to negate the unchanging objects leaving those object that have moved from one image to the next.

Shooting a whole sky survey in a timely manner requires an instrument with a good field of view, say 2 or 3 degrees. At a 3 degree field of view, it takes over 120 images to complete one 360 degree sweep of the sky with overlap. You then have to image above and below that first sweep to get the rest of the sky. Simply put, at 3 degrees field of view, it takes hundreds of images to complete a single spherical sweep of the sky. Reduce the field of view below 3 degrees and the number of images increases into the thousands pretty quickly.

It doesn't require large telescopes or extreme sensitivity. The old GEODSS telescopes are capable of detecting a volleyball sized object at geosynch distances using nothing more than a 40" mirror and an imaging tube. Newer sensors like the CCDs used in LINEAR are even more sensitive.

The field of view and sensitivity involve tradeoffs in the basic telescope design. A large telescope might be adjusted to provide good sensitivity and still have a reasonable field of view but at a higher development and operational cost. Smaller instruments combined with good sensors might be able to achieve similar performance for lower cost.

Cost is important, Ed, because if you can keep the price down to something reasonable, say a billion dollars, then you're much more likely to get the project funded in the first place. Timeliness is important because the next impactor could be inbound as we speak, so waiting 20-40 years doesn't seem prudent.

There's a saying, Ed, that goes "The perfect is the enemy of the good." You seem obcessed with the notion that the perfect system is a lunar based observatory. It's far from perfect for many reasons but let's set that aside for now. By insisting on your "perfect solution", you're killing any chance for a "good solution" like space based telescopes. Since I really doubt Congress, ESA, or anyone else is likely to pony up the tens of billions required to build multiple lunar observatories (it'd take more than one to do a whole sky search, what with sensor obscura and all that), then your opposition is really counterproductive to the goal of getting a comprehensive detection and tracking system in place.