BREAKING: Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos announces $3.4BILLION NASA mission to MOON 'to stay'

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has announced a plan today to travel to the moon in a collaboration with NASA.

In a tweet, Bezos said: "Honored to be on this journey with @NASA to land astronauts on the Moon - this time to stay."

NASA awarded Bezos and his private rocket firm a $3.4 billion contract to take astronauts back to the moon, said NASA's exploration chief Jim Free on Friday, May 19.

He continued to say, in his tweet:l "Together, we'll be solving the boil-off problem and making LOX-LH2 a storable propellant combination, pushing forward the state of the art for all deep space missions."

Bezos' company, Blue Origin, is the second company to be awarded a contract as part of NASA's Artemis programme. The first was Elon Musk's SpaceX which won a $3 billion contract in 2021.

A statement from Blue Origin says that under the contract, Blue Origin and National Team partners "will develop and fly both a lunar lander that can make a precision landing anywhere on the Moon's surface and a cislunar transporter."

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