By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A team led by Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin won a coveted NASA contract to build a spacecraft to send astronauts to and from the moon's surface, NASA's chief announced on Friday, capping a high-stakes contest.

NASA's decision will give the agency a second ride to the moon under its Artemis program, after it awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX $3 billion in 2021 to land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

Those initial missions using SpaceX's Starship system are slated for later this decade.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette, editing by Ben Klayman, Nick Zieminski and Marguerita Choy)