For a competition that still hasn’t officially launched, the Automotive X-Prize has certainly been doing a pretty good job of making itself known, and we’ve now got yet more details on it courtesy of the folks at CNET. First up, it seems that the X-Prize Foundation will finally get official with the competition “sometime next year,” although likely not before the New York Auto Show in the spring. Before that, however, the Foundation will be showing off some or all of the 43 contenders currently signed up at the Detroit Auto Show in January including, among others, Aptera’s 300 mile-per-gallon car pictured above. What’s more, given that the competition only seeks to find a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon, it would seem that Aptera would have a considerable advantage — assuming it can actually back up its claims, that is. Hit up the read link below for a peek at some of the other competitors.

For a competition that still hasn’t officially launched, the Automotive X-Prize has certainly been doing a pretty good job of making itself known, and we’ve now got yet more details on it courtesy of the folks at CNET. First up, it seems that the X-Prize Foundation will finally get official with the competition “sometime next year,” although likely not before the New York Auto Show in the spring. Before that, however, the Foundation will be showing off some or all of the 43 contenders currently signed up at the Detroit Auto Show in January including, among others, Aptera’s 300 mile-per-gallon car pictured above. What’s more, given that the competition only seeks to find a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon, it would seem that Aptera would have a considerable advantage — assuming it can actually back up its claims, that is. Hit up the read link below for a peek at some of the other competitors.

It looks like New Mexico’s the place to be for anyone looking to catch a glimpse of a possible future mission to the moon, with the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge set to get underway tomorrow at the Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo. As an added incentive for competitors, NASA is ponying up $2M in prizes, although they’ll have their work cut out for them if they want to take that home. Specifically, they need to show off a rocket-propelled vehicle and payload that “takes off vertically, climbs to a defined altitude, flies for a pre-determined amount of time, and then land vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad.” Then they have to do that all over again within a predetermined period of time. To open things up a bit, there’s also two difficulty levels but, as with all challenges of this sort, no one takes home a prize unless they fully meet all the requirements.

[Via Physorg, photo courtesy of X-Prize Foundation/Paragon Labs]