NASA dealing with impact hazards is like NASA fighting terrorists. It isn’t an agency that is built to respond to national (or international) threats. The DOD is, and it has at least as much space systems, tracking, and propulsion hardware and architecture knowledge as NASA does. If the nation decides that it must do so, such that there is a real “emergency”, then take money from NASA if you must and give it to an agency that can do it right. Protection of our planet is vastly more important than what NASA is mostly doing now.

As to your book, how much did you pay to get it printed? Have you ever written any refereed articles on this in professional journals? It’s not about the estimates from “you and I” for impact hazards. It’s about estimates validated by a consensus accepted authorities. That you consider yourself an accepted authority is no surprise.

We have a missle-tipped nuclear armada that could quite likely do a lot more damage to the Earth and to it’s inhabitants than any remotely likely asteroid impact. If you want to declare emergencies for the Earth, that would be a good place to start.

You are out of the loop on this one, and apparently you intend to stay that way, quite intentionally. Why?
Because NASA dealing with the impact hazard would take resources from projects which you are fascinated by.

Fundamentally, you and I have different estimates of the hazard from impact. For ELE’s, NASA’s old estimate is documented as being 4 times too low.

For smaller impacts, I wrote a book giving an estimate based on “recent” historical, archaeological, and geological data for the Americas. In our age of armed confrontations, nuclear power plants, and volatile chemical plants, even “small” impacts would have large effects.

Yes, and if you want to pick up the tab for two years of proper clean room storage, feel free…

(Extended storage well beyond the intended launch time was a factor in the failure of Galileo’s high-gain antenna to fully open, BTW.)

Or, and this is a possibility too, a Republican that doesn’t like what his party is doing. And since polls show that even many Republican’s are not happy about the shutdown, this is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

As to the exemption clause, betcha that far, far more deaths are going to result from other threats deserving exemptions than asteroid impact will. In fact, on the likely timescale of this shutdown, if we were to have identified an asteroid that was going to hit us during the shutdown, there would have been nothing we could have done about it. Just duck, everyone!

Asteroid threats are not an emergency. It’s just that simple. If they were, you can be sure that NASA would not have been given the job. Hey, we could put flashing lights on the crawler transporter to get traffic out of the way as it speeds down the crawlerway from the VAB.

From SPACE NEWS website

DARPA To Start Reusable Launch Vehicle Program

Re: Shutdown and Asteroid Workshop

Despite Hiram’s vigorous rationalizations, Planetary Defense is different than many other NASA tasks, and besides who scheduled this workshop, another good question is why the exemption clause was not invoked for it:

“The only exemptions to the shutdown concern “emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,” according to government documents.

This shutdown has to end by the middle of October; my estimate is that no one wants to threaten the dollar’s use as the world’s reserve currency.