Tesla's done a good job keeping itself out of the courtroom recently, but the good times don't last forever -- founder Martin Eberhard has just sued the company and CEO Elon Musk for libel, slander, and breach of contract. Eberhard claims that after he and Mark Tapenning founded Tesla, he was summarily pushed out of the company by Musk, wrongfully denied his severance package, and then disparaged both publicly and within the company -- and on top of it all, Musk sent the second Roadster produced out for "endurance testing" where it was wrecked instead being sold to Eberhard as promised. Ouch. Interestingly, the core of the lawsuit directly mirrors the suit filed former PR director David Vespremi over the same series of events, so it seems like there's a pattern here, but we'll see how much of this is true when Tesla and Eberhard face off in the courtroom -- our friends at Autoblog Green just received this statement from legendarily-prickly Tesla PR spokesperson Rachel Konrad:

This lawsuit is a fictionalized, inaccurate account of Tesla's early years -- it's twisted and wrong, and we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight. Incidentally, Tesla will also be filing counterclaims and in the process present an accurate account of the company's history.

Yeah, we'd say there are some fireworks brewing. Stay tuned.

Read - Autoblog Green
Read - Wired
Read - Eberhard's complaint [Warning: PDF]

The drama never stops at Tesla Motors -- following a morning of feverish rumors, the company has officially announced that it's replacing CEO Ze'ev Drori with board chairman Elon Musk. Tesla says that Drori will remain "active" with the company as a vice chairman of the board, but it looks like it's now more Musk's company than ever before -- and his first order of business is apparently to lay off staff to get the company "cash positive" in the next six to nine months. Other than the closing of the Detroit Tesla office, it's not clear what the layoffs will entail -- Musk say they'll be "modest" -- but hopefully we'll start to see more cars and fewer headlines from the upstart electric car company in the near future.

Read - CNET report
Read - Elon Musk blog post

If that homebrew rocket you've been building in your backyard isn't working out, maybe SpaceX will have some room for you on one of its many upcoming Falcon 9 missions. Now that the F1 has successfully achieved orbit, the F9 is slated for launch in Q1 2009. As you may recall, the aptly named Falcon 9 has nine engines rather than one, as with the F1. These redundancies were inspired by the Apollo's Saturn V and Saturn I rockets, noted for their flawless flight records despite engine failures. If all goes well, the launch will be followed by three more, including one with a crew and an F9 "Heavy" -- handy if you've got 25,300 lbs of marbles or whatever to haul up to the International Space Station. If you plan on hitching a ride, get your job applications in now -- only valued employees are scheduled to be passengers at this time. Got a more exotic destination in mind? Next up Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has his sights set on building a "Mars lander of some kind."

[Via Wired]

It's been a long road plagued with disappointments and major mishaps, but SpaceX (and founder Elon Musk) has finally made history -- on Sunday the company's Falcon 1 rocket reached orbit. After three attempts to bring the dream to life, the space exploration company succeeded in putting the first privately-developed rocket into space. The liftoff was seen live during a webcast, and the company's site was continuously updated with news, including a message written at 16:26PDT reading:

T+0:08:21 Falcon 1 reached orbital velocity, 5200 m/s

Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) - Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!!!!!!

Needless to say, after the trials and tribulations SpaceX has gone through (including the loss of Star Trek star James Doohan's ashes), this must be welcome relief... as well as the birth of a potentially lucrative new enterprise. Er, no pun intended.

[Via Slashdot; Thanks, Kenneth]

Wipe those tears away, budding astronaut. SpaceX's latest failure wasn't completely in vain. According to head honcho Elon Musk, the problem came just after a "picture perfect first stage flight" when a longer than expected thrust decay transient of the new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine became "just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse." You honestly may need to be a rocket scientist to digest all of that, but here's something even the layman can understand: Musk wants flight 4 in the air as early as next month. We're told that the long gap between flights 2 and 3 was simply due to all that engine engineering, but technologically speaking, nothing will change for the next attempt. Godspeed, Falcon 1 (v4).

[Thanks, Kenneth]

Yes -- more breaking electric car news! Just after Tesla CEO Ze'ev Drori announced Telsa's plans to build the Model S, Elon Musk began discussing its development of electric car tech to get the price of future cars to (and below) $30,000. When asked when that technology would be commercially available, Musk said that it shouldn't be any more than four years from now. Granted, a $60,000 car is affordable but still quite steep for most buyers -- but a vehicle mass-produced at half the price is essentially mainstream, which could have a substantial impact on the automotive world.

[Image courtesy of Edmunds]