Greenbang’s never thought of the military as being a particularly flexible bunch. Take Action Man. He’s so inflexible on the question of lower body nudity, he had his pants glued to his groin. And he could bend his knees or his elbows – how inflexible can you get?

It seems the six inches of hard plastic that was Action Man is not entirely representative, for FTL Solar has landed a fair whack of VC funding and it makes flexible structures embedded with solar panels for military uses, among others.

That fair whack, dear readers, comes in a series A funding round Terra Firma Capital Group, LLC and The Josh Mailman Foundation, with FTL hoping to raise at least $50 million in equity capital by Q4 2008.

The cash will go towards “domestic and international R&D, plant, marketing and business development initiatives”.

It’s raining cash for FTL today: it also revealed it’s landed a $200,000 matching grant from the New York State Energy Research Development Authority.

• Ikea spends big on clean tech start ups
• Roofer, insulator and electrician? Green needs you!
• Microgeneration – with grants, it’ll thrash nuclear
• Germany slashes solar grants for utilities
• Econcern to stump up €12 billion for green power
• DoE ready to splash out $60m on concentrating
• Solar-powered spy plane will fly for five years
• Vodafone goes for renewables in carbon-slashing plan
• NTR does Stirling $100m solar hook-up
• Popcorn doubles dyed solar efficiency rate