Unfortunantly I am afraid that it will take a hit before any policy makers take the threat seriously. We haven't really even got a good handle on the numbers of NEO's smaller than about 1km across, and we are no where near being able to track potentially catastrophic long-term comets from the Oort cloud or even the Kuiper belt.

It would truly be a tragedy if it took a hit from a mountain sized, or even skyscraper sized asteroid in a heavily populated area to kick start this planet into mounting large international coalitions to get us into space in a big way.

Maybe that is the answer to the question "What will it take to get us truly into space exploration".

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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.~ Carl Sagan ~

Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live.~Socrates, 500 B.C. ~

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~