SPACE.com Q&A with Asteroid Hunter David Morrison

Ron
Interesting point. A billion dollars could finance a ten year project of amateur astronomers and Space interest groups looking for near Earth objects. If you offer $500 for finding new near Earth objects, you will have a number of people out there looking for those objects and you will still keep the expense down to the people that have a camera and telescope set up already. Then the reward goes up from the long shot miss that may one day hit us to the sure shot dead on hit. Starting at the $500 reward for just any new near earth object and in no way shape or form is it going to hit us status, proceeding on an increasing reward scale not excluding anybody for fear of missing data, up to the confirmed impact. If you establish the $500 pay scale as the base payment and the distance for this scale as beyond say 5 million miles; you can establish a reward gradient using a simple rise over run equation with the base at $500 and exceeding 500,000 miles and the top established as the total funding value and zero miles, a direct hit.
The actual deflection effort would be several nations working together on this task and it would cost a trillion dollars or more. Perhaps the entire global economy would need to contribute to this effort to make it a success. Monitoring is very cheap, but actual "mitigation" or deflection technologies are very expensive. Research on the cheap and then when you have the suspects pegged you have the justification to make it expensive.
That is what I have to say. I hope I have not turned anybody off by my statement.
If I have, I want a rebuttal to hear what you have to say. If it is a good one I might change my mind.
George

David Morrison is a god in the NEO pantheon. But I was appalled by many
of his comments in the space. Com interview. First he says that if
someone gave him a billion dollars he wouldn't use it on NEO research
"Because I don't think it could be justified". Then he starts musing
about using a billion for mitigation (deflection) technologies and tests.
Very dumb. A billion dollars would be much, much, much better spent on
an array of telescopes to detect NEOs down to a smaller size than to spend
a penny on deflection/mitigation technologies. Finding the NEOs is
actually quite cheap compared to a lot of things NASA does.

Sigh.

Ron