When the U.S. Army wants to equip soldiers with solar panels instead of battery packs, or the Central Intelligence Agency wants to combine maps, databases, and satellite imagery—or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wants to find better ways to recycle water in space, whom do they call?

Time’s up, people—they call venture capital.

Or, to be more precise, they set up their own venture capital arms to help finance the cutting-edge technologies most likely to help them do their jobs. That way, they can ferret out and partner with the kind of innovative startups that might never make it through the bureaucratic government-contracting maze.

The latest entrant to the government innovation sweepstakes is NASA, which this month issued a “Request for Information” from organizations interested in partnering with the agency to set up an independent venture capital fund.

To be launched later this year, “Red Planet Capital” will be modeled on In-Q-Tel, an independent nonprofit firm set up by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999.

“NASA’s looking at going to the moon and returning to Mars and at ambitious plans for human space flight,” says agency spokeswoman Melissa Mathews. “We’re building on existing technology, but obviously there’s technology we need to foster, so this is one way of doing that.”

With $63 million from the CIA, In-Q-Tel partners with other venture firms to fund companies developing new ways to sort, handle, and secure data. So far, it has invested in more than 90 companies and reviewed more than 5,400 business plans, leveraging more than eight dollars in private capital for each dollar it puts in.

The Army followed the same model a few years later, when it set up OnPoint Technologies to invest in a $25-million venture fund. Both firms are independently run as nonprofits, a model NASA expects to follow.

The space agency plans to invest $11 million in fiscal 2006 and eventually increase that figure to about $20 million a year, focusing on technologies that involve water reuse and recycling, improvements to spacesuits and other machinery used in exploration, environmental monitoring and control, and data systems and biomedical support for exploration missions.

Maybe with the right investments, NASA can finally find a fix for the costly and fatal malfunctions that have put the agency under the harsh glare of the public spotlight in recent years.