Image by Lucy Wiley https://www.pinterest.com/lucywiley1946/
“This mission would answer a fundamental question: Are there asteroids or comets out there that can cause harm to the Earth over the next century?”
I can answer that question right now. Yes.
The first space age lasted four years and was essentially a cold war battle won by landing on the Moon. The next space age has the potential to once again be about the superpowers and nuclear weapons. The problem is humankind does not seem intelligent enough to make it happen. This could be a showstopper…as in stopping our species dead in its tracks with an extinction level event. The trick is to place thousands of nuclear weapons months away in space on fleets of spaceships and thus remove the hair-trigger-launch-on-warning situation from Earth.
And also defend Earth from comet and asteroid impacts.
And also explore the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants (and Ceres).
And also kick-start the Space Solar Power industry (and space colonization).
Maybe Amy Mainzer could make it happen. If she were to write an Einstein-type letter to the DNC: https://democrats.org/who-we-are/about-the-democratic-party/ recommending the Green New Deal might be best realized as a program to remove all nuclear weapons from Earth and place them in deep space on human-crewed spaceships.
In conclusion, I have written in the past about beam propulsion enabling mass migration to space habitats and I found this recent article worth editing in:
-Allison Jaynes, a space physicist at the University of Iowa states, “Besides safeguarding against a nuclear burst, RBR technology could have a civilian dividend, Jaynes notes. NASA and other space agencies have long wrestled with shielding astronauts from the Van Allen belts and other sources of radiation on their way to and from deep space. VLF transmitters might be used to clear out high-energy electrons just before a spacecraft enters a danger zone. “When we become more active space travelers,” she says, “it could provide a safe passage through the radiation belts.”
Ice on the Moon 