While the Bush Administration is busy spending tens, if not hundreds of billions working out his middle aged angst over WAND, the Near Earth Object program's at NASA gets just $3.5 million a year. The difference? The NEO program's is looking for asteroids that very definitely are out there (there's a long list of them found already), very definitely will collide with the Earth sooner or later (they have and will do as the see Tunguska Event proves), and very definitely will ruin our day when they hit no matter what country you're in.
Just to prove the point the NEO programme discovered on Monday a new near earth object designated as 2004 FH. Today, at 5:08 PST 2004 FH will come within 26,000 miles of the Earth as shown below.
Well what if luck wasn't on our side and it was coming straight for us and it was a little bigger than 100ft in diameter? Well four days notice isn't much to do anything, barely enough time to organize an effective evacuation let alone figure out how to stop it (which might require years of research, design and execution).
So this time we got lucky. No Tunguska, no global panic, no economic breakdown, no mass extinction. But next time? Well do you feel lucky punk? How about we spend more than $3.5M per year on some global insurance? $3.5M is about one twentieth of a cent per person, per year! Maybe we could find a way to increase funding to perhaps one cent, or even get all the countries in the world to chip in and make it, oh, say one dollar per person per year?