The case took on historic weight only after the Kingsnorth Six went to court, where they presented to a jury what is known in the United States as a "necessity" defense. This defense applies to situations in which a person violates a law to prevent a greater, imminent harm from occurring: for example, when someone breaks down a door to put out a fire in a burning building.

In the Kingsnorth case, world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, flew to England to testify. According to the Guardian, he presented evidence that the Kingsnorth plant alone could be expected to cause sufficient global warming to prompt "the extinction of 400 species over its lifetime." Citing a British government study showing that each ton of released carbon dioxide incurs $85 in future climate-change costs, the activists contended that shutting the plant down for the day had prevented $1.6 million in damages -- a far greater harm to society than any rendered by their paint -- and that their transgressions should therefore be excused.

What surprised both Greenpeace and the prosecution was that 12 ordinary Britons agreed. The jury returned with an acquittal, and the freed defendants made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. The tumult also produced political results. In April, British energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband announced a reversal in governmental policy on power stations, declaring, "The era of new unabated coal has come to an end." Discussing Kingsnorth, Daniel Mittler, a longtime environmental activist in Germany, told me recently, "it was probably one of the most impactful civil disobedience cases the world has ever seen, because it was the right action at the right time."

If not now ...

The idea that now is the right time for more resolute action to address the climate crisis is spreading fast enough to dot the global map with hot spots of disobedience. As it turns out, the Kingsnorth Six are part of a rapidly growing population. Joining them are the Dominion 11, arrested after forming a human blockade to stop the construction of a coal plant in Wise County, Va., in November 2008, and the Drax 29, who went on trial this summer for boarding and stopping a train delivering coal to a power plant in North Yorkshire, England, last year.

In fact, arrests are piling up quicker than journalists can coin name-and-number nicknames. The Coal Swarm Web site keeps track of an ever-lengthening list of protests. New headlines now appear weekly:

"Activists scale 20-story dragline at mountaintop removal site in Twilight, WV"

"14 Arrested at TVA headquarters in Knoxville, TN"

"10 activists board coal ship in Kent, England"

"Activists shut down Collie Power Station, Western Australia"

In August 2007, Al Gore, Nobel Prize-winning author of "An Inconvenient Truth," told Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, "I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants." By the time Gore made that statement, some young people had already started blocking bulldozers, and many more, young and old, would soon follow.

Still, Gore can be excused for feeling that such measures were overdue. With global warming, perhaps more than any other issue, there is a disjuncture between a widespread acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation we face and a social willingness to respond in any proportionate way.

The landmark 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that a two degree Celsius rise in average temperature, likely by 2050, would create severe water shortages for as many as 2 billion people and place between 20 percent to 30 percent of all plant and animal species at risk of extinction. It gets worse from there. An April 2009 Guardian poll reported: "Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed." More probable, they believe, is "an average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century," a level that could create hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing areas afflicted by desertification, depleted food supplies, or coastal flooding.

That these consensus predictions may feel remote and improbable to much of the American public does not reflect a real scientific debate, but rather a common reluctance to face unpleasant facts -- and also the considerable success of the coal and oil lobbies in dampening the electorate's sense of urgency about the issue. Those two realities are precisely what direct action intends to confront.

An inconvenient politics

When Vice President Gore started endorsing civil disobedience, Abigail Singer, an activist with Rising Tide, a leading network of grass-roots climate groups, noted, "It'd be more powerful if he put his body where his mouth is." She had a point.

As it happens, 68-year-old James Hansen, arguably the most famous climate scientist alive, has been less reticent about putting himself on the line. His involvement has furnished a great deal of mainstream respectability to those turning to more confrontational means of expressing dissent, and the trajectory of his political engagement catches an important trend.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hansen published many groundbreaking papers demonstrating the reality of a warming planet. Just as the work scientists had done in the early 1980s proving that human activity was creating a hole in the ozone layer had resulted in a 1987 treaty against chlorofluorocarbons, Hansen assumed that the work of those documenting climate change would result in swift legislative remedy.

"He's very patient," Hansen's wife, Anniek, told Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker. "And he just kept on working and publishing, thinking that someone would do something." This time around, however, industrial interests proved far more entrenched. In order to help move glacially slow climate negotiations forward, Hansen started speaking out and, more recently, has begun risking arrest at demonstrations.

Of course, there is never a shortage of people who will question the tactics of civil disobedience and direct action. "We're every bit as worried about climate change as the protestors," a spokesperson for the E.On Corp., the energy company that runs Kingsnorth, said upon the announcement of the famous verdict, "but there are ways and means to protest and we would suggest their demonstration was not the way to do it."

There are far less compromised skeptics, too. Many harbor a distaste for social-movement theatrics or operate on the belief that, sooner or later, science will speak loudly enough to force the political situation to sort itself out. Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy expressed such a view when the IPCC released its 2007 report. "The worst stuff is not going to happen," he said, "because we can't be that stupid."

Sadly, the latent hope that politicians will eventually come to their senses cannot suffice as a political strategy. The stark facts of segregation in the American South never put an end to that long-standing injustice; it took an unruly civil rights movement to force change. In this case, presumably less farsighted and more profit-hungry energy companies than the climate-concerned E.On have invested tens of millions of dollars in convincing elected officials and newspaper editorial boards that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is neither practical nor particularly needed. The operative force at work here is not stupidity, but political power.

Hansen and others motivated to confront the industry head on have concluded that, unless there is a public counterbalance to the organized money of those who profit from the status quo, what science has to say will be largely irrelevant, no matter how theoretically convincing it may be. Unless citizens themselves become inconvenient, the truth will remain a minor consideration.

The disaster you can see

It is no accident that, on June 23, when Hansen was arrested for his first time, it was in West Virginia, the heart of coal country. Because coal is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions both in the United States and worldwide, and because there is enough coal left in the ground to heat the planet to catastrophic levels, that fossil fuel has been the focus of much new protest. As long as U.S. and European power plants continue spewing coal smoke, their governments will have absolutely no credibility in trying to influence the policies of rising economies such as China and India. Nonetheless, current U.S. legislation ensures that coal burning will continue largely unchecked for decades to come.

In West Virginia, concerns about coal's impact on the atmosphere have intersected with a local environmental atrocity known as mountaintop-removal mining, a practice that Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama both claimed to oppose in the presidential campaign, but which continues today. This has made Appalachia the heart of direct action on the climate-change issue in the U.S. -- or, as a blog tracking area protests puts it, "Climate Ground Zero."

"You stand at the edge of one of these mountaintop removal sites and you'll never feel the same way again," says Mat Louis-Rosenberg, a staffer at Coal River Mountain Watch in southern West Virginia. The practice turns rolling mountains and valleys into flat, desolate moonscapes. Locals regularly hear the blasts of surface mines from their homes and then drink the resulting contaminants in their well water. When newly created lakes of toxic coal waste give way -- as happened last December as a billion gallons of sludge flooded 300 acres of land near Harriman, Tenn. -- they are the ones whose homes stand immediately downstream.

These dangers have given organizers a chance to create campaigns that connect the abstractions of climate change to specific sites of environmental ruin. "You can get a visceral and immediate sense of how bad this is," says Louis-Rosenberg. "It's not an invisible gas and a bunch of science that most people don't understand."

This year, in a series of escalating initiatives, environmentalists in the area have chained themselves to rock trucks, obstructed coal roads, and climbed up a huge crane-line mining machine to halt its work. A delegation of concerned citizens, including Hansen, crossed a police line onto the property of Massey Energy, a company responsible for mountaintop removals. Louis-Rosenberg places such direct action alongside a raft of other activities: community organizing, research for environmental impact statements, and gathering co-sponsors for a congressional ban on filling valleys with mining waste. "Ultimately, things will have to see their resolution in some sort of federal regulation or legislation," he says. "But at this point there is not the political will to deal with the crisis. I see it as my role as an activist to create that political will."

The next "Seattle moment"?

When the Kingsnorth decision was announced, an E.On representative said the company was "worried that this ruling will encourage other protestors to engage in similar actions at power plants across the country." The worry was justified.

The diverse local protests taking place internationally are starting to feel like part of something larger, especially since they are already beginning to have an impact. Of the 214 new coal plants proposed in the United States since the year 2000, more than half have been canceled, abandoned, or put on hold. The Web site Coal Moratorium Now, which tracks public campaigns, shows that citizen dissent played a critical role in many of the cancellations or delays. Other results have been less obvious but no less real. Facing greater resistance, and the prospect of costly public relations battles, power companies are simply proposing to build fewer coal plants than was once the case.

Environmental organizers are planning for still larger mobilizations. In March, hundreds of people, including Hansen and 350.org campaign organizer Bill McKibben, joined in human chains to block the entrances to a target of enticing symbolic importance: Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Power Plant, a coal-burning facility built in 1910 that provides steam and refrigeration power to Capitol Hill. Police avoided making arrests, which could have easily exceeded highs for any previous act of civil disobedience around climate issues in American history. Nonetheless, the gathering produced a desired effect: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Acting Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers requesting that the plant switch to natural gas.

On a global level, activists are starting to envision an international day of action that might launch disparate local campaigns into the mainstream spotlight and create a more unified global movement. A buzz of expectation and organizing now surrounds a December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where environmental ministers and other officials will gather to create a new treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol. The conference is taking place almost exactly 10 years after the 1999 Seattle protests, which overwhelmed the ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization and altered the shape of globalization debates for years after.

Hopes for re-creating an event of that magnitude are based on more than just a coincidental anniversary year. Before Seattle, localized activity by global justice advocates had similarly swelled -- with a wave of student anti-sweatshop drives, environmental boot camps, organic food gatherings, corporate ad spoofs, indigenous rights battles, and cross-border labor campaigns already simmering. Seattle united these into a recognized "movement of movements" more potent than the sum of its parts.

Organizers have suggested that as many as 100,000 people might take to the streets in Copenhagen. Among those planning around the Denmark conference, there is currently a debate about whether to converge on the conference itself or to target a heavily polluting company somewhere nearby as an example of bad climate-change behavior.

Likewise, in the United States, where events will be timed to take place in solidarity with the demonstrations in Copenhagen, there is a debate about whether to try to work with the Obama administration or turn up the heat on it. In the end, a range of tactics will no doubt be deployed in Copenhagen and in other cities around the world. A coalition of groups, including the normally satiric Yes Men, is managing a site called BeyondTalk.net, which allows people to sign a pledge expressing their willingness to join in nonviolent civil disobedience as the conference date nears.

As of this writing, 3,210 people have signed on. Compared with the numbers of people who will ultimately have to be persuaded of the need to act in order to force meaningful solutions to climate change, that remains a modest tally. In terms of the growing levels of dedication and personal sacrifice it represents, its significance is far greater. After all, that's more than 3,000 people willing to take the chance that a determined action, even a botched one, might ultimately reverberate far and wide. It's more than 3,000 people who may just be willing to climb for hours through a huge radiator in order to stop the planet from becoming one in all too short a time.

The comet's impact -- it punched a hole the size of the Pacific Ocean, and would have annihilated a lesser planet, like Earth -- was discovered by an amateur astronomer in Australia. Siegel asked how such an event escaped the notice of the world's great observatories.

"There are only a few really large telescopes," Levison explained. "They're hard to get time on, and so they're dedicated to particular projects. And the amateurs really are the only ones that have time just to monitor things to see what's happening."

"Part of the Neighborhood Watch looking out the front door," Siegel suggested.

Neighborhood Watch. Dr. Levison liked that analogy and so do I. Combined with the recent passing of space enthusiast Walter Cronkite and the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, it got me thinking about the value of exploring the cosmos at a time of economic destitution on the ground and a national deficit that makes the word "astronomical" seem inadequate.

As a kid, I was in thrall to the space program. Squinting into the night above rural upstate New York, my family and I sometimes could see those early, primitive satellites traverse the dark sky, and my younger brother, a skilled amateur astronomer to this day, would haul out his telescope for us to look at the craters of the moon, or Jupiter, or Saturn's rings.

In the auditorium of my elementary school, a modest, black-and-white television set was placed on the stage so we could watch the space flights of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and for a class project in the sixth grade, I tracked the mission of astronaut Gordon Cooper, dutifully moving a tiny, construction paper space capsule across a map of the world as Cooper orbited the planet 22 times.

Six years later, in 1969, we sat downstairs in the family room of our home and watched the mission of Apollo 11. I remember Cronkite's exultant, "Oh boy!" as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, and staying up through the night to watch the first moonwalk. (Years later, editing a TV series on the history of television, colleagues and I noted how, in his excitement, Cronkite almost talked over Armstrong's "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.")

As time went by, America became blasé about space exploration. The budget for moon landings was curtailed after the first few, and flights of the space shuttle became commonplace save for the horrific, fatal explosions of Columbia and Challenger.

We speak now of returning astronauts to the moon and manned missions to Mars, yet efforts to do so seem halfhearted. But there can be no denying the greater understanding of the universe gained from the amazing images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, and data from satellites and unmanned interplanetary probes. And beyond the jokes about Tang and Velcro, NASA and the space program have generated advances in a range of technologies.

Which brings us back to that notion of the Neighborhood Watch, for one of the most valuable contributions of our exploration of the skies has been the knowledge gained from being able to examine our own earthly neighborhood from the distance of space.

Invaluable information is obtained from satellites monitoring weather and the damage created by drought, floods, fire, earthquakes and climate change. But that fleet is aging and few new satellites are being launched to replace them.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Jane Lubchenco, the new head of the National Oceanic and Administrative Administration (NOAA), was quoted in the British newspaper the Guardian. "Our primary focus is maintaining the continuity of climate observations," she said, "and those are at great risk right now because we don't have the resources to have satellites at the ready and taking the kinds of information that we need ... We are playing catch-up."

The paper went on to report that, "Even before her warning, scientists were saying that America, the world's scientific superpower, was virtually blinding itself to climate change by cutting funds to the environmental satellite programs run by the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. A report by the National Academy of Sciences this year warned that the environmental satellite network was at risk of collapse."

This news comes on the heels of a NOAA report that the world's ocean surface temperature for June was the warmest on record, and the release of more than a thousand spy satellite photographs of Arctic sea ice that were withheld from public view by the Bush administration.

On the morning of July 15, the National Research Council issued a report asking the Obama administration to release the pictures; the Department of the Interior declassified them just hours later. A source told the Reuters news service, "That doesn't happen every day ... This is a great example of good government cooperation between the intelligence community and academia."

The images are remarkable. You can see a selection of them online at http://gfl.usgs.gov/ArcticSeaIce.shtml. Arctic ice is in retreat from the shores of Barrow, Alaska, along the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and west of Canada's Northwest Territories, and from the Bering Glacier, among many other sites.

"The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic," the Guardian noted. "More than a million square kilometres of sea ice -- a record loss -- were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year. Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse."

One reason, of course, for the Obama White House's release of the dramatic photographs is to bolster support for the climate change bill narrowly passed by the House and now awaiting action in the Senate.

The bill's a thin-soup version of what many believe needs to be done. It inadequately reduces emissions, gives away permits and offsets to industry, and, as Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth recently told my colleague Bill Moyers on "Bill Moyers' Journal," strips away the Environmental Protection Agency's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

But even this watered-down version of the climate legislation is in jeopardy, collateral damage from the healthcare reform fight. "A handful of key senators on climate change are almost guaranteed to be tied up well into the fall on health care," the Web site Politico.com reports. "Democrats from the Midwest and the South are resistant to a cap-and-trade proposal. And few if any Republicans are jumping in to help push a global warming and energy initiative."

If true, it's hard to imagine a bill passing before December's U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen. Harder still, without a law of our own, to imagine the United States being able to convince China, India and developing nations to pass climate regulations and change polluting behaviors.

In other words, there goes the neighborhood.

What became of the astronauts on that fateful mission? Buzz Aldrin became a unsuccessful car salesman and now has a new book out about his years struggling with alcoholism, depression and infidelity. Armstrong largely shied away from the media spotlight after returning to earth and worked at an aviation software company for over a decade. Michael Collins, who stayed on Apollo 11 and orbited while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, became the forgotten man on the mission, but he was the director of the National Air and Space Museum after he returned.

Collins and Aldrin now both think the U.S. should go to Mars rather than trying to return to the moon. "I worry that the current emphasis on returning to the Moon will cause us to become ensnared in a technological briar patch needlessly delaying for decades the exploration of Mars - a much more worthwhile destination," Collins recently said.

As with the JFK assassination and 9/11, the moon landing has proved an irresistible topic for conspiracy theorists. The idea that the moon landing was an elaborate hoax started in earnest with Bill Kaysing's 1974 book, "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle." Kaysing had worked as a technical writer for Rocketdyne, a company that helped to construct rocket engines for NASA's Apollo program. Kaysing claimed the U.S. government filmed the moon landings in Area 51 in Nevada and that astronauts would have been poisoned had they actually landed on the lunar surface. He wrote that NASA did not have the expertise to put astronauts on the moon. Other conspiracy theorists, such as filmmaker Bart Sibrel, have claimed that the moon landing video must be fake because the American flag seemed to ripple though the moon has no wind and due to irregular shadow and light patterns on the tape.

However, even if you happen to believe that the moon landing was a fake, don't tell that to Aldrin. In a now infamous video from 2002 posted below, Sibrel confronted Aldrin and called him a coward. Aldrin responded by punching Sibrel in the face.

In 2004, President Bush announced his plan for sending humans back to the moon and eventually Mars. Last week, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, proposed a manned mission to "Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight," in part to study geologic-time-scale climate change on the red planet. Long before then, however, our struggle to deal with rapid, human-caused climate change here on Earth will overwhelm even a modest effort to put humans beyond planetary orbit again.

I was too young to be directly inspired by John F. Kennedy's 1962 speech at Rice University, in which he famously declared that the U.S. would be the first country to send a man to the moon by decade's end. But reread or listen to the speech and you will be amazed by its prescience. Many of Kennedy's words are as true today as they were a half-century ago:

We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

He saw the space race through the lens of American exceptionalism -- no "nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space" -- but he predicted benefits for all humankind:

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.

President Obama made the same kind of plea the day before the House of Representatives was to vote on the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill:

We have seen our reliance on fossil fuels jeopardize our national security. We have seen it pollute the air we breathe and endanger our planet. And most of all, we have seen other countries realize a critical truth: the nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.

Ironically, Obama's new mission to save planet Earth is the only hope of preserving the moral leadership of this country that Kennedy took for granted.

Imagine the next 50 generations suffering from global warming of 10°F, sea levels rising 1 or 2 inches a year, dust bowls over one-third of the habited land, loss of more than half the species and oceans turned into hot, acidic dead zones. That is now what the science says we risk if we simply keep doing what we've been doing -- if the richest country in the world, the one responsible for the most cumulative emissions, refuses to devote a small fraction of its wealth and scientific talent to preventing this disaster. I think it's safe to say that nobody will be writing any books about us called "The Greatest Generation."

Kennedy ended his speech with an appeal to the universal human spirit to conquer the unknown:

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Today, we know that the most hazardous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked is the transition to a carbon-free economic and energy system that's capable of sustaining and expanding prosperity for 9 billion people. The alternative is, as a new 6,700-page report by world leaders concludes, catastrophic climate changes whereby "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilization will collapse."

At the same time Kennedy warned that science and technology "has no conscience of its own," he related the accelerating rate of technological change: "This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old -- new ignorance, new problems, new dangers."

He could have been talking about the accumulation of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is also occurring at a breathtaking pace -– 10,000 times faster than it ever had in nature over the past 800,000 years. We transformed the global economy with fossil fuels in a century, creating new ills, new dangers that we are only now beginning to understand.

Humanity has only two paths forward. We voluntarily switch to a low-carbon economy over the next two decades, or the reality of catastrophic climate change and peak oil forces us to desperately start doing so by the end of the 2020s. The only difference between the two paths is that the first one spares our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren, untold misery. It creates a sustainable future where activities like manned space travel can be contemplated again.

The Apollo program was a major science and engineering effort to develop and, most important, deploy a variety of technologies to achieve a very difficult mission -- like climate action. But the comparison between the two only goes so far.  Kennedy said:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

The hard goal of solving climate change is about more than winning a competition. Kennedy explained that the space effort "has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs." But those new jobs were only as sustainable as the manned space program, whose benefits and interest to the public were limited and waning. The transition to a sustainable economy, on the other hand, will be bring great and increasing benefits to the public, ultimately generating millions of jobs.

Kennedy asserted: "I think that we must pay what needs to be paid." That is most certainly true of the mission to save a livable climate. Yet for all its magnificent majesty, Apollo was a relatively small-scale government program with little direct connection to the U.S. economy. It pales in comparison to the urgent task of replacing the nation's and world's fossil-fuel-based energy system with low carbon sources.

In 2002 dollars, the entire Apollo program cost $185 billion over 10 years -- an increase of $128 billion over the existing space budget. The stimulus bill passed by Congress this year increased short-term funding for the development and deployment of clean energy technology by $90 billion. While that is projected to sharply increase the market share of clean energy over the next several years, the public and private sector of this country alone will need an Apollo-level effort every year for the next few decades to avert climate catastrophe.

Fortunately, clean energy technologies have many other benefits, including reducing air pollution, cutting oil imports and saving Americans tens of billions of dollars in energy costs. So the net impact on the economy of even aggressive climate action like the recent climate bill approved by the House has a net cost to U.S. households of about a postage stamp a day, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

While technologically bold, the Apollo moon missions were, ultimately, a government program that Americans could gaze at and wonder from afar. The grander technological challenge today is a national effort that every American must participate in.

Kennedy said we had to go to space because "our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men."

More than ever we need to employ our leadership in science and industry to solve the mysteries of peace and security for the good of all women and men. But not by returning to space. Our top planetary mission for the foreseeable future must be to stop destroying the one climate hospitable to the one civilization that we know of in the entire galaxy.

NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is “not qualified” to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses.

In addition, Griffin is scripting NASA employees and civilian contractors on what they can tell the transition team and has warned aerospace executives not to criticize the agency’s moon program, sources said...

Chris Shank, NASA’s Chief of Strategic Communications, denied that Griffin is trying to keep information from the team... However, Shank acknowledged Griffin was concerned that the six-member team -- all with space policy backgrounds -- lack the engineering expertise to properly assess some of the information they have been given...

Said John Logsdon, a George Washington University professor who co-wrote the book honored at the NASA party, "There is a natural tension built into this situation... Mike is dead-on convinced that the current approach to the program is the right one. And Lori’s job is to question that for Mr. Obama. The Obama team is not going to walk in and take Mike’s word for it.”

...

According to industry officials, Griffin started calling heads of companies working for NASA, demanding that they either tell the Obama team that they support Constellation or refrain from talking about alternatives.

The companies, worried that Griffin may remain and somehow punish them if they ignore his wishes, have by and large complied...

Tensions were on public display last week at the NASA library, as overheard by guests at a book party.

According to people who were present, Logsdon, a space historian, told a group of about 50 people he had just learned that President John F. Kennedy’s transition team had completely ignored NASA.

Griffin responded, in a loud voice, “I wish the Obama team would come and talk to me.”

Alan Ladwig, a transition team member who was at the party with Garver, shouted out: “Well, we’re here now, Mike.”

Soon after, Garver and Griffin engaged in what witnesses said was an animated conversation. Some overheard parts of it.

“Mike, I don’t understand what the problem is. We are just trying to look under the hood,” Garver said.

“If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar,” Griffin replied. “Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood."