Now that we're starting to talk about branching into different sub-groups, I think it's prudent to discuss this a little bit. I know the x-prize isn't directly in our goals, but at the same time I wouldn't say no to $10M and some recognition. We'll be putting an unmanned craft on the moon at some point as part of our testing; my thought is that if we can allocate a bit of payload on it, we can have a team build a rover that meets the qualifications for the x-prize. They could even work mostly as an independent group, from our side it would just be a payload, to be replaced by a human capsule on a later mission. From the team's perspective, they wouldn't need to worry about any of the rocketry, just building a rover that can complete the x-prize tasks once on the moon.
The only downside I can see is that the x-prize timeline may not line up well with our own, and I don't think it's worth drastically modifying our schedule to try and pull this off.
What do you think? Is this worth including as a goal for our project. Even just being registered as a team could bring some more attention to our effort, and I see that as a good thing. But I'm sure there are lots of pros and cons that I haven't thought about yet.