Practical solutions
<The government, despite 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.
Afraid Larry's right. As much as I would like to see Moon bases, the NEO detection rationale isn't going to fly as the sole reason for them.
Right now ground-based and orbital systems could be funded for far less than a Moon base that would improve our LEO detection capability geometrically over the current systems which are barely scraping by. This seems to be the way to go right now.