There's been a lot of talk the last couple of years about returning to the moon. China has made great strides with their space program, having actually had people in orbit. They've made noises about a moon mission. So has India, and even Japan. The US of course was shooting for Mars, according to President George Bush a while back. Though precious little has been heard of of those plans of late.

But everyone has just sort of discounted one of the greatest industrial powerhouses, Germany. It's not as though they don't have the tradition. Germany was after all the first nation to blast a man made object into space, when their V-2 ballistic missiles were first tested and reached an altitude of 189 km in 1944.

But the same war they were made to fight, ended with the almost total destruction of Germany, the disbandment of its rocketry program, and the scientists working on it and the prototypes hauled off to the United States and the Soviet Union, kickstarting their space race.

In the years following the Second World War, everyone has gotten used to Germany fitting the description President Calvin Coolidge once gave the United States, "The business of America is business.". They have great engineers, make and sell great cars, but don't do flash and bang.

Well, they just might. They're now seriously talking about sending an unmanned shuttle to the moon by 2013. And unlike say India, when the Germans say they're going to do something, I tend to take their word for it.

According to Financial Times Deutschland (German text), Walter Döllinger, the head of the country's space agency, the German Aerospace Centre or DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft und Raumfahrt eV), told the paper, "We want to show that Germany has the know-how,". The DLR has presented its plans for the mission to the German parliament. And the federal government was mulling the project.

A high-ranking official in the economy ministry, Helge Engelhard, said Berlin was "not negatively disposed" towards a moon mission.

He added that the mission should have clear scientific or technical goals.

It is estimated that sending a shuttle to orbit the moon would cost Germany between 300 and 400 million euros (396 million to 528 million dollars).

Financial Times Deutschland has a slide show detailing the planned design of the vehicle.