Barack Obama and NASA administrator Michael Griffin,

Charles Dharapak / AP; NASA; Matt Stroshane / Getty

Getting into a shouting match with the HR rep is not exactly the best way to land a job. But according to the Orlando Sentinel, that's just what happened last week between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Lori Garver, a member of Barack Obama's transition team who will help decide if Griffin keeps his post once the President-elect takes office. If the contretemps did occur, it could help doom not only the NASA chief's chances, but the space agency's ambitious plans to get Americans back to the moon.

The mere fact that the story is making the rounds reflects the very real friction between NASA and the transition team — which has sparked a groundswell of support among space agency employees to keep the boss. Within NASA, there is a real concern that while the Obama campaign rode the call for change to a thumping victory in November, change is precisely what the space agency does not need. (See photos of different countries' space programs here.)

The stagnant NASA of the past 20 years has been poised to become a very new NASA — thanks, in many respects, to the outgoing Bush Administration. In 2004, the President announced a new push to return astronauts to the moon and eventually get them to Mars. Many skeptics saw the hand of political whiz Karl Rove in that, suspecting that the whole idea was just a bag of election year goodies for space-happy states like Florida and Texas, as well as for voters nostalgic for the glory days of Apollo. But Bush, NASA and Congress did mean business, and eventually came up with a plan under which the space station would be completed and the shuttle would be retired by 2010. That would free up about $4 billion per year, which would be used to pay for a new generation of expendable boosters as well as a 21st century version of the Apollo orbiter and lunar lander for those rockets to carry. (Read about the space moon race here.)

"At the time, the shuttle had flown 290 people, and out of those 14 were dead — nearly one in 20," says Scott Horowitz, a four-time shuttle veteran who designed the Ares 1, one of the new boosters. "We needed something that was an order of magnitude safer."

NASA has moved with uncharacteristic nimbleness in the last five years and is already cutting metal on the new machines in the hope of having crews in Earth orbit by 2015 and on the moon by 2020. Schedules have slipped some — the original plan was to launch the orbital missions in 2014 — and costs have swollen, though so far not dramatically. (See the Top 50 space moments since Sputnik.)

"We've been moving in the right direction since the Columbia accident [in 2003]," says Chris Shank, NASA's chief of strategic communications. "The concern is that we'll lose that." Lately, that concern appears well-placed.

The Obama team picked Garver to run the NASA transition, in part because of her deep pedigree and long history at the space agency, which saw her climb to the rank of associate administrator. But Garver started as a PAO — NASA-speak for a public affairs officer — and never got involved in the nuts and bolts of building rockets. She is best known by most people as the person who in 2002 competed with boy-band singer Lance Bass for the chance to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket. Neither of them ever left the ground.

Garver's lack of engineering cred is especially surprising in light of the eggheads with whom Obama has been surrounding himself — most recently, Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped to be Secretary of Energy. Garver is also not thought to be much of a fan of Griffin — who is an engineer — nor to be sold on the plans for the new moon program. What she and others are said to be considering is to scrap the plans for the Ares 1 — which is designed exclusively to carry humans — and replace it with Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, which are currently used to launch satellites but could be redesigned, or "requalified," for humans. Griffin hates that idea, and firmly believes the Atlas and Delta are unsafe for people. One well-placed NASA source who asked not to be named reports that as much as Griffin wants to keep his job, he'll walk away from it if he's made to put his astronauts on top of those rockets.

NASA is right to be uneasy about just what Obama has planned for the agency since his position on space travel shifted — a lot — during the campaign. A year before the election he touted an $18 billion education program and explicitly targeted the new moon program as one he'd cut to pay for it. In January of 2008, he lined up much closer to the Bush moon plan — perhaps because Republicans were already on board and earning swing-state support as a result. Three months before the election, Obama fully endorsed the 2020 target for putting people on the moon. But that was a candidate talking and now he's president-elect, and his choice of Garver as his transition adviser may say more than his past campaign rhetoric.

The dust-up between Griffin and Garver is said to have occurred last week at a book launch party in Washington when, according to the Sentinel, a red-faced Griffin told Garver she was "not qualified" to make engineering decisions. Horowitz, who was not at the party but knows the NASA boss well, says he doubts that Griffin raised his voice.

"I think that's bulls---," he says. "I believe that anything he was asked he was very honest in answering because he's a systems engineer. And Lori Garver is not equipped to make technical judgments on the architecture of a space exploration system." The unnamed NASA source concedes that Griffin can be brutally honest and occasionally tactless, but insists that his shouting is simply improbable. The Obama transition office did not return an e-mail seeking comment from Garver.

For now, says the NASA source, both present and former astronauts as well as some NASA contractors are quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — lobbying for Griffin to stay. But the incoming administration is not saying anything so far. It was President John F. Kennedy who famously committed Americans to reaching the moon. Now it is Obama — who so often invokes the themes and style of JFK — who may decide if we go back.

Network Security Breaches Plague NASA

Repeated attacks from abroad on NASA computers and Web sites are causing consternation among officials and stirring national security concerns

Space Shuttle Discovery preparing for launch in July 2005 NASA/SSPL/The Image Works

By Keith Epstein and Ben Elgin

America's military and scientific institutions—along with the defense industry that serves them—are being robbed of secret information on satellites, rocket engines, launch systems, and even the Space Shuttle. The thieves operate via the Internet from Asia and Europe, penetrating U.S. computer networks. Some of the intruders are suspected of having ties to the governments of China and Russia, interviews and documents show. Of all the arms of the U.S. government, few are more vulnerable than NASA, the civilian space agency, which also works closely with the Pentagon and American intelligence services.

In April 2005, cyber-burglars slipped into the digital network of NASA's supposedly super-secure Kennedy Space Center east of Orlando, according to internal NASA documents reviewed by BusinessWeek and never before disclosed. While hundreds of government workers were preparing for a launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery that July, a malignant software program surreptitiously gathered data from computers in the vast Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Shuttle is maintained. The violated network is managed by a joint venture owned by NASA contractors Boeing (BA) and Lockheed Martin (LMT).

Undetected by the space agency or the companies, the program, called stame.exe, sent a still-undetermined amount of information about the Shuttle to a computer system in Taiwan. That nation is often used by the Chinese government as a digital way station, according to U.S. security specialists.

By December 2005, the rupture had spread to a NASA satellite control complex in suburban Maryland and to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of Mission Control. At least 20 gigabytes of compressed data—the equivalent of 30 million pages—were routed from the Johnson center to the system in Taiwan, NASA documents show. Much of the data came from a computer server connected to a network that tracks malfunctions that could threaten the International Space Station.

BEYOND HACKERS

Seven months after the initial April intrusion, NASA officials and employees at the Boeing-Lockheed venture finally discovered the flow of information to Taiwan. Investigators halted all work at the Vehicle Assembly Building for several days, combed hundreds of computer systems, and tallied the damage. NASA documents reviewed by BusinessWeek do not refer to any specific interference with operations of the Shuttle, which was aloft from July 26 to Aug. 9, or the Space Station, which orbits 250 miles above the earth.

The startling episode in 2005 added to a pattern of significant electronic intrusions dating at least to the late 1990s. These invasions went far beyond the vandalism of hackers who periodically deface government Web sites or sneak into computer systems just to show they can do it. One reason NASA is so vulnerable is that many of its thousands of computers and Web sites are built to be accessible to outside researchers and contractors. Another reason is that the agency at times seems more concerned about minimizing public embarrassment over data theft than preventing breaches in the first place.

In 1998 a U.S.-German satellite known as ROSAT, used for peering into deep space, was rendered useless after it turned suddenly toward the sun. NASA investigators later determined that the accident was linked to a cyber-intrusion at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. The interloper sent information to computers in Moscow, NASA documents show. U.S. investigators fear the data ended up in the hands of a Russian spy agency.