Some people don’t want to hear it. Supporters of industries that profit from the fossil-fuel status quo routinely challenge those facts, and treat them as political talking points. This week, a dirty trick played on one of the chief industry front groups, the Heartland Institute of Chicago, a major source of “climate denialism,” as the fact-based scientists like to call it, revealed just how politicized the issue has become.

On Tuesday, an individual claiming to be a Heartland donor persuaded the group to email him or her the group’s annual budget, its fundraising plan and a 2012 strategy paper, outlining the organization’s intent to insert contrarian views of climate change into the nation’s elementary schools.

The dirty email trick was reminiscent of a similar ploy in 2009, when someone hacked into emails of a British science consortium that advises the U.N. on climate change and released them publicly, revealing an argument between scientists on some of the evidence. At the time, Heartland touted the private emails as proof that scientists do not in fact agree on the causes of global warming, a development they call the “Climategate” scandal.

After reviewing the new Heartland documents, Gavin Schmidt, a scientist with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who models and studies climate change, told Salon:

This is exactly the kind of thing we see people doing, and we know they have been actively promoting the fringe voices, trying to influence teaching curricula, trying to lobby legislators, trying to undermine the conclusions of bodies. But it is good to know who is actually funding them.

Heartland, which bills itself as anti-regulatory and libertarian, annually produces climate change “denier” conferences and pays expenses for elected officials to attend. For example, the budget shows that Heartland allocated $304,704 for scientists supporting its contrarian views in 2012.

One of these scientists is Fred S. Singer, a physicist and National Weather Bureau satellite center founder, who is said to receive $5,000 a month. The same day as the document leak, a science watchdog named John Mashey released a detailed investigation into Singer and his Science and Environmental Policy Project, indicating that he failed to properly fill out income forms for the foundation. Singer has previously worked with Heartland arguing that secondhand smoke is harmless. One of Heartland’s funders, according to the documents, is Phillip Morris.

Other scientists, researchers and pseudo-scientists on the Heartland payroll include a former California TV weatherman, Anthony Watts, who runs an anti-climate change science blog called WUWT (Watts Up With That). Heartland budgeted him $90,000 for a “special project.”

On his blog yesterday, Watts admitted taking an unspecified sum:

Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.

The Heartland budget allocates more than half a million dollars for “government relations” and another $800,000 for communications. Besides the big-budget annual climate conference, another $25,920 was budgeted for eight “Heartland Capital Events” identified as “events in state capitals for elected officials,” at $3,240 each.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Heartland is legally barred from using its tax-free income of $7.7 million to lobby for or against legislation. The fact that the group appears to be intending to do just that could transform the group’s ongoing public relations disaster into a legal problem. Heartland’s activities are no surprise to environmentalist watchdogs, but actual proof of moneys spent on lobbying activities might affect their legal status, if the IRS bothers to investigate.

Besides trying to influence public (and lawmaker) opinion on fossil fuels and climate change, Heartland works on other overtly political projects that have nothing to do with climate change.  The group gave $612,000 for something called “Operation Angry Badger,” aimed at the nonscientific goal of supporting Wisconsin’s anti-union Gov. Scott Walker, who is targeted for recall by progressives.

Worried that liberal (and, in their view, overpaid) public schoolteachers are turning young minds green with impunity, Heartland planned to pay a coal industry consultant named David Wojick about $25,000 per quarter, to create a curriculum to counter global warming education in schools.

“Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political,” the document states. “Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success.”

Heartland is not alone in attacking the issue through the schools. Three states (Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota) have passed so-called Environmental Literacy Improvement Act bills — written by energy industry shills — that require schools to teach climate change “denial” along with conventional climate science. Other states are considering such measures.

“The big issue is that they are using charitable status to lobby,” Schmidt asked. “They are not an educational outfit. They are doing this to influence legislators. To what extent is it appropriate for them to be filing nonprofit status?”

A strategy paper indicated that Heartland has targeted Forbes and the New York Times as outlets for its message. Forbes has “begun to allow high-profile climate scientists … to post warmist science essays that counter our own,” the documents says. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate change and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”

The paper recommended cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences, “such as Revkin at DotEarth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW communicators.”

“Mugging of a private organization”

Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely, reached by Salon on Wednesday, declined to comment on whether Heartland engages in lobbying. He insisted that at least one of the leaked documents  (the “strategy” paper) is a “fake” and therefore he wouldn’t concede the authenticity of any of the others, although he didn’t deny it either. The organization did publicly apologize to donors whose names were revealed, indicating that at least some of the information is accurate.

Was there poetic justice in an email trickster obtaining internal documents from Heartland, just as Heartland used hacked emails of climate scientists arguing over details to promote the alleged “Climategate” scandal.

Lakely rejected the notion:

There are profound differences between this online mugging of a private organization that is not receiving public funds, and what happens to organizations where taxpayer dollars and international funds are involved. There is a level of accountability that the public is entitled to and that is not remotely parallel to ambushing a private organization’s private documents. I expect [progressives and environmentalists] to make those comparisons, but we are not a public entity.

Lakely also denied that Heartland’s efforts have helped turn a scientific debate into a circus of political claims, counterclaims and dirty tricks. “What the Heartland Institute has been encouraging for a long time is a scientific discussion,” he said.  “We invite people who even hate the Heartland Institute to engage in civil open and public debate about what the science says is happening to the planet.”

Among the listed donors were big pharmaceutical companies and insurers (financing the Heartland’s “Choose Your Medicine” project aimed at fighting what it calls “Obamacare”). The Charles Koch Foundation kicked in $200,000 to the healthcare effort. Energy companies and trusts affiliated with them were behind financing for the climate projects.

After the documents leaked, some of the listed donors distanced themselves from Heartland. Microsoft told the New YorkTimes that its $59,908 donation was not in cash, but in software that it routinely provides nonprofits. A Glaxo Smith Kline spokeswoman confirmed the company’s $50,000 donation but added, “We absolutely don’t endorse their views on the environment.”

The document leak inspired much glee among enviro-bloggers like DeSmogBlog and Think Progress Green, but NASA’s Schmidt said tainted science is a serious problem that exists beyond Heartland’s lobbying efforts.

“I don’t think Heartland is either powerful or particularly well-funded,” he said. “They do channel money to these small number of skeptics who make a living being skeptics. But those people would exist without them. The politicization of this topic has come about because people perceive there are political consequences to this problem. What is surprising is that scientists who are just doing their job get pulled up and investigated just because somebody doesn’t want to agree with their results. And that has been driven to a large part by groups like Heartland. “

“Job well done, America,” replied Mission Control.

With the shuttle’s end, it will be another three to five years at best before Americans are launched again from U.S. soil, with private companies gearing up to seize the Earth-to-orbit-and-back baton from NASA.

The long-term future for American space exploration is just as hazy, a huge concern for many at NASA and all those losing their jobs because of the shuttle’s end. Asteroids and Mars are the destinations of choice, yet NASA has yet to settle on a rocket design to get astronauts there.

Thursday, though, belonged to Atlantis and its crew: Ferguson, co-pilot Douglas Hurley, Rex Walheim and Sandra Magnus, who completed a successful space station resupply mission.

Atlantis’ main landing gears touched down at 5:57 a.m. sharp, with “wheels stop” less than a minute later.

“The space shuttle has changed the way we view the world and it’s changed the way we view our universe,” Ferguson radioed from Atlantis. “There’s a lot of emotion today, but one thing’s indisputable. America’s not going to stop exploring.

“Thank you Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour and our ship Atlantis. Thank you for protecting us and bringing this program to such a fitting end.”

The astronauts’ families and friends, as well as shuttle managers and NASA brass, were near the runway to welcome Atlantis home. Difficult to see in the darkness, Atlantis was greeted with cheers, whistles and shouts. Soon, the sun was up and provided, finally, a splendid view. Within an hour, Ferguson and his crew were out on the runway and swarmed by well-wishers.

“The things that we’ve done have set us up for exploration of the future,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., a former shuttle commander. “But I don’t want to talk about that right now. I just want to salute this crew, welcome them home.”

Nine-hundred miles away, flight director Tony Ceccacci, who presided over Atlantis’ safe return, choked up while signing off from shuttle Mission Control in Houston.

“The work done in this room, in this building, will never again be duplicated,” he told his team of flight controllers.

At those words, dozens of past and present flight controllers quickly streamed into the room, embracing one another, wiping their eyes and snapping pictures.

NASA’s five space shuttles launched, saved and revitalized the Hubble Space Telescope; built the space station, the world’s largest orbiting structure; and opened the final frontier to women, minorities, schoolteachers, even a prince. The first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, became the oldest person ever in space, thanks to the shuttle. He was 77 at the time; he turned 90 this week.

Born with Columbia in 1981, it was NASA’s longest-running space exploration program.

“I haven’t cried yet, but it is extremely emotional,” said Karl Ronstrom, a photographer who helps with an astronaut scholarship fund. He witnessed the first shuttle launch as a teenager and watched the last shuttle landing as a middle-aged man.

It was truly a homecoming for Atlantis, which first soared in 1985. The next-to-youngest in NASA’s fleet will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a museum display.

This grand finale came 50 years to the day that Gus Grissom became the second American in space, just a half-year ahead of Glenn.

Atlantis — the last of NASA’s three surviving shuttles to retire — performed as admirably during descent as it did throughout the 13-day flight. A full year’s worth of food and other supplies were dropped off at the space station, just in case the upcoming commercial deliveries get delayed. The international partners — Russia, Europe, Japan — will carry the load in the meantime.

It was the 135th mission for the space shuttle fleet, which altogether flew 542 million miles and circled Earth more than 21,150 times over the past three decades. The five shuttles carried 355 people from 16 countries and, altogether, spent 1,333 days in space — almost four years.

Two of the shuttles — Challenger and Columbia — were destroyed, one at launch, the other during the ride home. Fourteen lives were lost. Yet each time, the shuttle program persevered and came back to fly again.

The decision to cease shuttle flight was made seven years ago, barely a year after the Columbia tragedy. President Barack Obama nixed President George W. Bush’s lunar goals, however, opting instead for astronaut expeditions to an asteroid and Mars.

Last-ditch appeals to keep shuttles flying by such NASA legends as Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Mission Control founder Christopher Kraft landed flat.

It comes down to money.

NASA is sacrificing the shuttles, according to the program manager, so it can get out of low-Earth orbit and get to points beyond. The first stop under Obama’s plan is an asteroid by 2025; next comes Mars in the mid-2030s.

Private companies have been tapped to take over cargo hauls and astronaut rides to the space station, which is expected to carry on for at least another decade. The first commercial supply run is expected late this year, with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launching its own rocket and spacecraft from Cape Canaveral.

None of these private spacecraft, however, will have the hauling capability of NASA’s shuttles; their payload bays stretch 60 feet long and 15 feet across, and hoisted megaton observatories like Hubble. Much of the nearly 1 million pounds of space station was carried to orbit by space shuttles.

Astronaut trips by the commercial competitors will take years to achieve.

SpaceX maintains it can get people to the space station within three years of getting the all-clear from NASA. Station managers expect it to be more like five years. Some skeptics say it could be 10 years before Americans are launched again from U.S. soil.

An American flag that flew on the first shuttle flight and returned to orbit aboard Atlantis on July 8, is now at the space station. The first company to get astronauts there will claim the flag as a prize.

Until then, NASA astronauts will continue to hitch rides to the space station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft — for tens of millions of dollars per seat.

After months of decommissioning, Atlantis will be placed on public display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. Discovery, the first to retire in March, will head to a Smithsonian hangar in Virginia. Endeavour, which returned from the space station on June 1, will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Ferguson said the space shuttles will long continue to inspire.

“I want that picture of a young 6-year-old boy looking up at a space shuttle in a museum and saying, ‘Daddy, I want to do something like that when I grow up.’ “

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AP writers Mike Schneider at Cape Canaveral and Seth Borenstein in Houston contributed to this report.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

 3. Big Brother moment of the day: Who knew the Secret Service read Tumblr? Kyle McDonald created People Staring at Computers just three days ago, to  document individuals taking pictures of themselves in Apple stores. Now he’s being investigated by the government for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

4. Breast law of the day: Supermodel Gisele Bundchen thinks it should be illegal not to breastfeed your child for at least six months after he or she is born. OK, but how about an age cap for weaning?

5. One small step of the day: The space shuttle Atlantis launched for the last time today. Watch three decades of shuttle launches compiled by NPR: 

A Blast From the Past: Shuttle Through the Decades from NPR on Vimeo.

Rescued long ago from the attic of my parent’s house on Long Island, not five miles from the Grumman Aerospace Corp., where the Apollo Lunar Module was built and where my father spent his days scrawling bizarre math figures resembling hieroglyphics on chalkboards located inside buildings I was rarely allowed to visit (“What do you do, Dad?” I once asked, and he replied, helpfully, “You wouldn’t understand.”), this little action figure — never call it a doll — has always been within reach.

His blue eyes fading under cracking paint, his rubber arm dangerously close to amputation, Major Matt looks down at me as I type, though lately I’m the one staring back wistfully. STS-135 may be the end of an era for NASA — for physicists, aeronautical engineers and tens of thousands of other folks who scored 800 on their math — but it’s the end of the line for us non-science space pretenders as well: those of us who don’t know their yaw from their pitch, who get nervous just hearing words like “geosynchronous orbit,” yet whose childhood is inextricably tethered, like Billy Mumy in the opening credits of “Lost in Space,” to all things astronaut.

Like so many other 7-year-olds in 1969, I wanted to be tethered to a capsule, too, right up until the day I rode the Long Island Rail Road into New York City with my grandfather, who, after opening some accounts at Republic Bank and securing some free toasters, took me to the top of the Empire State Building. Couple my newly discovered acrophobia with another crippling disease for a fledgling astronaut, not having a single scientific bone in my body, and my space years were numbered before they ever began.

But it’s impossible to have grown up near Bethpage, N.Y., during that time — in the shadow of Farmingdale’s Republic Aviation, builder of the mighty P-47 Thunderbolt, and a stone’s throw from Roosevelt Field, site of Lindbergh’s takeoff, and, most importantly, in a place that served as the universal answer to any local elementary school career-day question: What does your father do? He works at Grumman — and not come out the other end a space geek. On my block alone, two kids, not one, were building futuristic hovercraft in their garages. Paging Steven Spielberg.

That’s why this English major remembers what doomed Apollo 1 on the launch pad (the capsule was pressurized with pure oxygen), knows what the title of Michael Collins’ lunar memoir was (“Carrying the Fire”), and can still name with ease the original seven Mercury astronauts. Two C’s, two G’s and three S’s, my mental cheat sheet still at the ready. (Glenn and Grissom are easy, but the last “S” is a guaranteed trump card, as few people ever come up with Deke Slayton, and fewer still know that while even though he never flew a Mercury mission, Slayton finally got his chance in 1975 during Apollo-Soyuz.)

Aerospace so dominated life on Long Island that if you said you were from Bethpage, not a single person asked about the Black course or golf — only Grumman. The Black, host to two recent U.S. Opens, was in a bit of disrepair then, and thought of, at least by the under-12 set, only as a good place to sled in winter.

Grumman, on the other hand, was bustling. From the legendary Hellcat and Wildcat, powerhouses of the Pacific, to A-6 Intruders of the Vietnam era, the company was a larger-than-life presence in my hometown. For years I dreamed about knowing what was behind all those guard booths that dotted the massive campus, or what kinds of planes were landing at the airstrip off South Oyster Bay Road, excruciatingly blocked from public view by jet blast deflectors. In Plant 3, work was under way on wings for Grumman’s newest fighter, the F-14 Tomcat, the plane Tom Cruise would one day make into a sex symbol. Plant 5 was where the LEM was being built, the craft that would literally save the Apollo 13 astronauts and ensure Grumman’s place in space history. And deeper off Stewart Avenue, Plant 26, the computing sciences/artificial intelligence lab, where my father worked on his … well, I don’t have a clue.

Somehow all of this filtered down to us kids, the ones destined for MIT and the ones destined for Chaucer. Wearing the uniform of the day, plaid shirt matched with pants of long vertical stripes, I perused and re-perused the Estes model rocket catalog in bed, spending my allowance on spacecraft with names like Big Bertha and Citation. Painstakingly gluing and painting these rockets in a basement with no ventilation (“Is the window open?!?” my mother would yell down. “Yessssssss!!” I’d yell back, though in reality the basement window, with 20 bent, rusty nails going in every direction, would have required a regiment to open it), I watched as some of them actually attained altitude, though just as many got toppled by the wind moments before liftoff, taking healthy divots out of the Old Bethpage Grade School baseball diamond.

But more than anything else, we played with Mattel’s kid-toy masterpiece, Major Matt Mason, a 6-inch rubber astronaut figure wearing a helmet with an orange visor. Tom Hanks is an unabashed Matt man, and astronauts over the years have been rumored to have taken him into space with them. I used to pretend that he — me — was trapped with Penny Robinson, of the “Lost in Space” Robinsons, on the rocky surface of Alpha Centauri. I spent hours jury-rigging those flimsy arms, so much so that my playroom sometimes resembled astronaut triage — visors from other Matt Mason characters like Sgt. Storm being affixed to Doug Davis; legs from Lt. Jeff Long, an African-American astronaut action figure decades before a real-life one ever flew, attached to Major Matt. (Nowadays, Transformers and Bakugan toys regularly feature 379 pieces to potentially lose; Matt was as simple as they come.)

Four decades later, Major Matt has survived countless cleaning ladies, the occasional leaky ceiling, and many a move, when he and his rubber brethren are thrown back into their Satellite Locker, a vinyl carrying case I got as a consolation prize after my brother broke my arm in 1970, and carted off to a new base of operations.

My broken arm. My older brother Daniel snapped it while we were wrestling, and he wrote about the incident in a 2006 memoir about the Holocaust, of all things. To him, it was a metaphor for fraternal estrangement, for the distance between two young siblings — one who cared about model rockets and the other who would occasionally dress as an Egyptian pharaoh. But I saw past the cruelty then, and I see past it now. To me that broken arm was one of the great moments in my life. Without the fracture, my father, who is not an effusive gift-giver, might not have taken me to the five-and-dime and let me pick out any toy I wanted. And I went for the Major Matt Mason Satellite Locker.

The space program is grinding to a halt this week — no more T-minuses, no more astronaut walk-outs, no more boring but glorious shots of CAPCOMs hovered over computer screens. My link to it is long gone, too. My dad retired ages ago and Grumman was bought by Northrop in 1994, her Bethpage buildings reappropriated for other uses by other companies. The airstrip was built over, and cavernous Plant 5 is now a fledgling movie studio. I hear parts of “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie, were filmed there. Everywhere else, as far as my memory is concerned, tumbleweed might as well be blowing.

But Major Matt Mason lives on. Last month Tom Hanks announced a deal to make a big-screen movie about my favorite little action figure. But while a Hollywood movie ensures that a new generation of kids will come to know Major Matt, I kind of want him to myself, sitting up there on his perch above my monitor, that right arm forever waiting to break, just as mine did 41 years ago.