NASA Boldly Ventures Into Terrestrial Real Estate Management

NASA and Google recently announced plans to jointly develop a research center at the NASA/Ames base here in Silicon Valley:

Michael Bazeley, San Jose Mercury News: "Google, NASA team up"
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There was an immediate backlash from officials in Mountain View and Santa Clara County claiming Google is getting out of paying its fair share of property taxes:

Jessica Portner, Julie Patel, San Jose Mercury News: Is Google's NASA campus a search for a tax break?
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According to the following article, NASA opened bidding for high-tech tenants for the Ames campus back in March 2005. It's not clear whether Google was one of the bidders mentioned in the article, or whether the other bidders were bidding on the same parcel of land as Google (the 213 acres available for the research park is much larger than the million square feet of space Google has committed to developing):

Chaddus Bruce, Palo Alto Daily News: "NASA to start bid for Research Park Monday"
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Setting aside the taxation controversy, I was curious whether NASA practiced sound financial stewardship of the excess land at Ames, which, we should remember, belongs to the American people, not NASA managers with ambitions to get into high-tech real estate development.

The above articles contain enough information to do the math: 4000 employees x 250 sq. ft/employee x $2 sq. ft./year = $2 million/year. Estimated property tax break for the tentant: $3 million/year. That's about $5 million per year. So, Google's annual payment of 4.5 million dollars, plus the money it will put into campus development is in line with market rates. NASA made, at least, a fair deal.

Still there are lots of questions to which I'd like to have answers: Did NASA ever consider selling the excess property? Did they accept bids only from "companies involved in technologies that can support space exploration"? If bidding was opened in March 2005, why do they say NASA been talking to Google for years?

Finally, with the newly dawning age of private space exploration, could we convince Google to simply buy NASA outright?