Ye cannae evaluate my space program! Ye dinnae have the power!

That's probably not exactly what NASA administrator Michael Griffin told Lori Garver, who is heading up Barack Obama's space transition team. But according to the Orlando Sentinel, that's the gist of it. While a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told the paper that agency officials were getting on famously with the Obama team, numerous reports suggest a more fraught relationship. The White House has directed federal agencies to give the president-elect's representatives an all-access pass, but several sources claim Griffin has sought to control access to his subordinates and stage-manage their interviews with the transition team.

Tensions apparently came to a head last week at a book party held in NASA's library. Attendees overheard an "animated" conversation between Griffin and Garver, a former associate administrator at the agency, during which the NASA head told Garver she was "not qualified" to assess the technical aspects of agency programs. To Garver's protestations that the team simply wanted to "look under the hood," Griffin reportedly shot back: “If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar, because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood."

To get to the source of this apparent bad blood, Ars spoke with Keith Cowing, a former NASA manager who now edits the Web site NASAWatch. The main bone of contention, Cowing told us, is the Bush administration's troubled "Vision for Space Exploration" moon program, which Griffin had been charged with bringing to fruition. "He pretty much threw out what was done before and started from scratch," says Cowing. "He came up with a plan that a lot of people say really wasn't ready for prime time, and he just shoved it down everyone's throat."

There were, admittedly, a few kinks to work out of the program's flagship Ares I rocket. There was the niggling question of whether the ship would actually have enough power to get into orbit. Then there was the possibility that the rocket could shake its crew to pieces like a tuning fork from Hell, which some might call a design flaw.

Somehow, though, the Ares beat out some 30,000 alternative proposals. "By coincidence," says Cowing, "the design that was picked was the one [Griffin] drew on the back of an envelope the day he showed up." Despite "comical" design reviews, says Cowing, Griffin "hugged the program closer. He tried to tell people that it was vetted and reviewed, but nobody really believes it. This Ares rocket has been sucking every drop of moisture from every corner of the agency."

Griffin, who holds more degrees than most people have socks, is accustomed to being the smartest guy in any given room. But this very expertise may have made him deaf to criticism of his decisions at the agency—and now, apparently, resentful of attempts by outsiders who don't share his impressive credentials to identify past mistakes.

The NASA head has expressed his desire to stay on at the agency under a new administration, but in November said that he believe it was unlikely Obama would ask him to remain. It's looking less likely by the day.