Elon Musk's SpaceX wins Nasa contract to send humans to the moon

Nasa has picked SpaceX to build a spacecraft which will land the first woman on the moon by 2024.

The space agency awarded Elon Musk's space exploration company with $2.9bn to create a "human landing system", which will put two astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time in almost 50 years. SpaceX beat Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, which had also been in the running to build the spacecraft since last year.

Under the Artemis program, Nasa plans to send four astronauts into lunar orbit on its Orion spacecraft. From there, two crew members will board the SpaceX landing system and transfer to the moon. They will spend a week exploring the moon's surface before returning home.

It hopes that the Artemis mission will “pave way for sustainable exploration at the moon and future missions to Mars”.

It is the first crewed mission to mars since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager at Nasa, said: "During the Apollo program, we proved that it is possible to do the seemingly impossible: land humans on the Moon.

"By taking a collaborative approach in working with industry while leveraging Nasa’s proven technical expertise and capabilities, we will return American astronauts to the Moon’s surface once again, this time to explore new areas for longer periods of time."

Nasa has been scrambling to pull together its Artemis program after President Donald Trump ordered that Americans must return to the moon by 2024.

The announcement will deal a bitter blow to Mr Bezos, who 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.