I live in the world of reality. That reality includes fiscal limitations. To ignore fiscal reality is the sign of a fool. For government programs, fiscal reality springs from political reality. There is no support in Congress, the White House, nor the electorate for building a moon base. Wish it weren't so but like I said, I have to deal with reality.

Here's one little tidbit of reality: the entire military budget for space surveillance is under $100 million a year. That covers mostly O&M of a series of space surveillance sensors around the world. The total outlay for NEO detection is a tiny fraction of that. You can't fund a moon base on a million dollars a year. Not even $100 million a year.

It doesn't surprise me that NASA employees (bureaucrats) would advocate a hugely expensive program that would increase their budget many times. That's how bureaucrats operate. It still doesn't pass the fiscal, political, or technical tests.

The irony is that on the one hand you keep stressing the importance of searching for NEOs right away, while on the other hand you keep advocating a program that would delay the search by many years. Do you even realize the absurd contradiction?

I agree that we need to step up our NEO search program. Until someone is willing to pay for it, we have to scrape by as efficiently as possible. Multibilliion dollar moon base fantasies simply will not happen. Even if some disaster happened, like a significant NEO took out a city, you probably wouldn't see the funding for the moon base. The government, dispite its foolish tendancy to throw money at a crisis, would see that orbiting telescopes could do the job faster, sooner, and a whole lot cheaper.