The best way to divert those asteroids and comets on an impacting course with the Earth (and yes, they do currently exist, but we simply have not found them yet) is with the use of nuclear electric power generators.

You use the nuclear power supply to propel the interceptor to the potential impactor. After arrival, you then you use the exact same power plant to power the lasers to ablate the impactors surface, and the reaction is a course change.

But spending money on this before spending money on finding the damned things is ass backward. The people who are tracking these things are putting in 120 hour weeks, and have been for a long time - this is simply not right.

Further, the only way to reliably find these things with sufficient time to do anything other than run for cover is with the use of space based telescopes, and big ones at that. NASA is doing nothing here, and some officials were actually arguing against their use.

At some point this will sink in, and the feathers will fly, but exactly when is still not certain. It may be in the first few half of this year, when the NSF reports...

ep