Some scientific endeavors can be paused and maybe later relaunched, if funding has not dried up and temporarily-worthless machinery has not been left to rot.

But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.

>the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth

I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.

Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.

Is that sort of research unavoidably impaired by a more crowded night sky? Or do we just have to spend more to collect the same quality of data from more or better terrestrial observatories?