Free Republic

BeyondWords Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s alleged affair with the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin prompted the couple’s divorce earlier this year, according to a report published Sunday. The Wall Street Journal reported that Brin, who along with Larry Page co-founded Google in 1998, filed for divorce from his wife of nearly four years, Nicole Shanahan, in January just weeks after learning that she had a brief affair with Musk in December.

NASA plans to delay the next phase of its Mars Sample Return campaign and split a lander mission into two separate spacecraft to reduce the overall risk of the program. At a March 21 meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, revealed that NASA and the European Space Agency had agreed to revise the schedule and design for upcoming missions that will return samples being cached by the Perseverance rover to Earth. Original plans called for the launch of both a NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander and ESA-led Earth Return Orbiter in 2026....

This Friday, Elon Musk's The Boring Company, will begin work on its $52.5 million underground people mover at the Las Vegas Convention Center. A release sent out by the LVCVA states that the company's boring machine has been put in place, and will begin tunneling at the convention center on Friday at 3 p.m. The people mover, which travel through two one-mile tunnels across the convention center's 200-acre campus, is designed to transport convention-goers to various destinations in about one minute.

Critics of California’s plan to link the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas by high-speed rail have cited the estimated cost of the project – and now that cost is projected to increase by about $2 billion, according to a report. The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority now estimates that the plan will cost about $79 billion – with the price of the Central Valley segment already under construction rising from $10.6 billion to $12.4 billion, Bloomberg reported. The revised cost estimates were attributed to changes in the scope of the project and planning for contingencies, the report said.

The Department of Defense is weighing whether to suspend or revoke the tech entrepreneur’s security clearance for his SpaceX private venture that launches spy satellites for the federal government following an incident last year where he smoked a marijuana cigarette during an appearance on a comedian’s podcast, FOX Business has learned.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office has called into question the state’s authority to grant permission to Tesla founder Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Co., to build several miles of tunnels for his high-speed Hyperloop transportation system below the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. The State Highway Administration granted a conditional utility permit on Oct. 16 to allow The Boring Co. to begin building the tunnels, if the company supplies additional information about the project and it meets all necessary requirements. But the Hyperloop system “is not a utility under federal standards or SHA’s federally-approved utility accommodation policies,” Assistant Attorney General David Stamper...