This post is clearly nothing but uneducated opinion.

I think detection is feasible. Tacking on the other goodies, no matter how much fun, really doesn't have much to do with that mission. A great case can be made for all of those ideas. It would be nice to know the particulars of all types, composition, structure, and so on. Critical, even. But the baby could easily drown in the bath water.

And once detection was in place it would be easy to add on exploration of them. "Origin of life" is always sexy, was used to fund the Moon program and still is the Mars exploration. And of course needing that information to devise a deflection plan would sell at that point.

The odds that a real hazard will occur in this round of technology are fairly small. Probably nothing in the next 20 years. Or hundred, or even thousand. It would be easy to plan and build all manner of stuff which would be obsolete by the time something is found.

I would think that for the forseeable future we'd have to count on finding an object in time to devise a response to it. Clearly every asset in the world would be available.

By The Way: Am reading Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" again. A lot in it I didn't remember. At that time some people believed there would be an atmosphere all the way up there, and the jury was out as to whether or not there was life on the Moon. The capsule was launched from the highest place in Florida, 1800' ASL.

Arf