"When you examine the necessary real requirements for finding the next one of these things before it hits, as Dr. Mazanek has, you find that Moon based facilities are optimal."

Well, all I have to go on is the RASC "Comet/Asteroid Protection System (CAPS)
Concept Summary & Proposed FY02 Focus Area Descriptions" that Dr. Mazanek did back in '01. That report doesn't really seem to swing one way or another. I do note that he doesn't seem to directly compare with an EML-1 station, but rather with "– Heliocentric orbit (nominally at 1AU – potentially Lagrange points)". In the absence of further qualification I have to assume he's talking about the Sun-Earth L-points (i.e. SOHO, Genesis, future NGST, etc.)

What I'm proposing is that the issue get addressed sooner rather than later by integrating two disparate NASA objectives that can be met over the near term.

OSF wants to visit the EML-1 "point"
OSS wants to look for NEOs.
OSF can deliver and certify a NEO tracking instrument for OSS on their very first visit to EML-1.

Its value ensures that we will periodically return, to service, upgrade and refuel it. Eventually we'll have an EML-1 station as we push back to the Moon.

As for Mr. Brosz:
"one major advantage: it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to maintain. Which is why we haven't scrapped all the Earth-based observatories and built a dozen new Hubbles."

But its value is what keeps us going back. Our current infrastructure of course keeps it difficult, but it won't always be that way.

Besides, the adaptive optics at ESO weren't exactly cheap. The actual costs of our telescopes are rather difficult to uncover. I was able to find that in 1999 (I think) ESA spent Euro 35Mn on upkeep at ESO. That's one structure. A private foundation is (was) paying something like $70Mn for a new scope in Chile. Ground based scopes aren't exactly nickle and dime operations. It's just that their true costs are masked in the private financial statements of academia, foundations, government entities and others.

Space based systems are especially expensive if that's the only thing you're doing, as is the case with Hubble. In the kind of architecture's that I think NASA is talking about (and that I know I am talking about), a NEO search function would be only one marginal aspect of a much larger and more complex operation.

Eventually we will have an all-spectrum astronomical capability on the Moon. But do you think the NEO search scientists would be able to get NEO search instruments on the Moon first, ahead of the radio astronomers and gamma, x, microwave and other frequency astronomers? Get real. Once the scientific community starts waking up to the kind power they'll have with instruments emplaced on the Moon they'll all be scrambling to get there first.

Right now they're just in denial because they don't think it'll happen in their lifetimes and to fantasize about it is just to painful.

There's nothing wrong with having NEO search equipment in both locations, at EML-1 as well as the Moon. Eventually.

Ad lunam,
Kadet Ken