"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."

Actually, there is. 70% of the public wants NASA to spend its money finding these things before they hit, and they put that as NASA's number 1 job. They also expect NASA to perform at a 100% level, and get irritated at NASA when it doesn't do it right.

Now since as Dr. Mazanek has quite rigourously shown, the 100% way to handle impactor detection is with facilities based on the Moon, the minimum that NASA has to do for the people it serves is to at least cost it out for them and present that option and that number to them. It will then be up to the people whether or not to go ahead and build these facilities.

"Wish it weren't so but like I said, I have to deal with reality."

Well, then, you can take all of this as real good news.

"Here's one little tidbit of reality: the entire military budget for space surveillance is under $100 million a year."

Wasn't NRO budget at $3,000,000,000 per year, and not $100,000,000? If there's been such a massive reduction, one would think that there would be an outcry at the diminuation of our defense.

"That covers mostly O&M of a series of space surveillance sensors around the world."

I know that number does not cover either launch or construction costs, and my guess is that when you total all of the O&M up, along with the analysis, $100,000,000 per year pretty much just covers the Pentagon, without any allocation of other operating costs to this particular O&M activity.

"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."

My back of the envelop estimate is that Moon based facilities are do-able for around $11,000,000,000 total, spread over many years, assuming that standard commercial launchers and a Moon orbiting fuel trnasfer station are used. This is man "tended", not "manned" full time.

Okay, double that to $20,000,000,000 if you like. It doesn't matter, since on the other side of the equation sit the complete extinction of all of mankind in the next large impact, along with the deaths of say about 100,000,000 or so people in the next "small" mega-tsuanami. (And these last have been occuring about once every 1,000 years or so recently).

The cash equivalent total is maybe 6 or 7 B-2 bombers.

"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."

Actually, the plan passes all three tests with flying colors, and it is an engineering plan which some of the "bureaucrats" in NASA have done their best to suppress.

"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?"

There is no contradiction, because what I actually do is advocate spending on all of it. We need $200,000,000 for the LSST, and we need the mods to the MSX sats as well. We need to spend on the cataloguing, the SEW warning system, the whole 9 yards of it. And we need to start spending this money now.

"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."

Actually, the public is willing to pay for finding these things, but some NASA bureaucrats are unwilling to do it. If they can't get their act together right quick like, my plan is to get them fired and then use the money to hire somebody who actually will work hard to ensure the public's safety and put that as their number one priority.

"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."

No fantasy. Loose Omaha, and watch what happens. Hell, just let one of these things trigger off a nuclear exchange between say Pakistan and India, and watch what happens the next week.

"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."

That's the best part - they can't do the job cheaper, and just saying that ain't going to make it so.

If you have found a problem with Mazanek's comparative analysis of efficiencies, then write up a detailed technical critique and get it published.

Speaking about reality, I think that I have done enough to discharge my public responsibilities. This is going to be the work of others now.

ep