Nasa has picked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a spacecraft that will put astronauts on the moon for the first time in almost 50 years.
The news will deal a bitter blow to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin was in the running to build the spaceship that would eventually send a crewed mission to the lunar surface in 2024.
Blue Origin was awarded a contract to begin building a spacecraft for the mission last year, along with SpaceX and another US technology company named Dynetics.
However Nasa on Friday announced that Nasa is entrusting SpaceX with the $2.9bn tender on its own.
Nasa has been scrambling to pull together its Artemis program after President Donald Trump ordered that Americans must return to the moon by 2024.
Nasa hopes to land the first woman on the moon and pave way for “sustainable exploration”, using the mission as a jumping off point to eventually get humans to Mars.
The last crewed mission to the moon was in 1972, under the Apollo program.
Mr Bezos recently announced he would be stepping down as chief executive of Amazon to focus on projects like Blue Origin, which has long struggled to shrug off its younger rival.
SpaceX has become the better known of the two space companies and regularly works with Nasa. Its success is largely down to its innovative reusable rockets, which Mr Musk says will drastically cut the cost of space travel.
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