Hah, believe me I have been looking into ways to get professionally involved in astrobiology once my PhD is done (gimme 18 months, cracking fascinating problems in the study of metabolic regulation and systems bio here). It's pretty hard to break into, though there was that massive gift for SETI from that Russian billionaire recently... it's either that, going into metabolic engineering, or continuing with basic Eukaryotic cell biology for me most likely.