We Built the Asteroid Detector. We Won't Fund It.

The dinosaurs had no warning system—they got 66 million years of dominance, then 10 seconds of arrival.

The K-Pg impact vaporized forests, boiled oceans, and extinguished 76% of all species on the planet. It is the clearest possible argument for planetary defense. If we can see it coming, we survive it.

We built detection systems. Infrared surveys, ground-based telescopes. NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office—the technology works, and we have already found most of the extinction-sized rocks orbiting near Earth.

The problem masquerading as a technical problem is something else entirely. The unstated assumption is that we will continue looking for decades without interruption—without a recent near-miss to justify the budget, without a funding crisis or a war or a political administration that decides pandemic response or infrastructure or tax cuts are more urgent than scanning the sky for something that might never arrive in anyone's lifetime.

Catalina Sky Survey runs in Arizona and Vera Rubin Observatory will come online in Chile next year. Together they will find maybe 90% of the remaining hazardous asteroids within the next decade. Then what—the scan continues, or it doesn't, the equipment ages out, the staffing gets cut, the money goes somewhere else. Nobody gets fired for letting the asteroid program slide. The risk stays diffuse. Planetary defense actually depends on sustained political will that survives budget hearings, indifference. The absence of catastrophe as proof of concept.

We know how to detect extinction-level threats. We are far less confident we know how to fund that detection for 30 years in a row. Is the actual problem. The question isn't whether we can see the asteroid. It's whether we will care enough to keep watching after the news cycle moves on.