Re:Private/Commerical Structure (Score 2, Informative)

That being said, NASA's funding is extremely small, most small tech startups have more money to work with.

Um, huh? NASA's FY06 budget, across all missions, is about 16.5 billion. It goes up by about 1.5 billion over the next 4 years. I'm going to avoid getting into whether this is enough money or not. I work at a NASA center and I have my own views of how money is spent & allocated.

If you can point me out a tech startup that is seeded with a 16 BILLION dollar budget PER YEAR, please post because they must be doing some seriously cool things. I'm not even sure that Microsoft, arguably the worlds biggest software company (or is it Oracle now) has that type of yearly operating budget.