The German government is to contribute to a German research and engineering body that plans to put a space rocket into orbit round the moon and obtain data to map the moon's surface in great detail. This project is to be followed by a landing to obtain physical samples of various areas of the moon's surface so that a geophysical mapping can be carried out.
The Germans have said they are doing this separately from the European Union space research bodies. They remark that they have the economic, technical engineering and organisational skills to be confident of the success of their project.
They were pioneering in all this in 1941 and were hindered only by the intervening losses of the second world war and the removal en masse of their scientists and engineering infrastructure to America and the Soviet Union.
If the speed and efficiency with which eastern Germany has been rehabilitated since the fall of the Wall, the costs so deftly spread across the whole of the EU (only fair, I concede) and the glowing confidence and surefootedness with which they are stepping up to globalizing, and distributing fairly, are to go by, I believe them.
Last year my visit to Berlin was a winter adventure ( I have remarked before on the weirdness of walking through the Austalasia houses of the Botanischergarten fully euipped with parrots, looking out at a snowbound landscape) so my friend and I may go a little later.
Should we be looking to buy a bit of the Moon? Or at least a bit of Berlin.
Library users will know that I have been taken away by German culture and its denial to me by aforementioned contrary circumstances.
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