Nasa has said it will aim to put the first woman and next man on the moon in five years.
The Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama will serve as the headquarters for the new program to build a spacecraft to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024.
The endeavour will likely cost between $20 and $30 billion (£16 to £24 billion).
Companies including billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Elon Musk's SpaceX and Lockheed Martin Corp are developing different potential components for the lunar lander.
They will compete for Nasa funds under competitive bids due to be solicited later in the year.
The space agency’s administrator named the program Artemis and requested Congress increase Nasa’s proposed budget for next year by $1.6 billion.
The Apollo lunar spacecraft was built at the same centre half a century ago.
Eugene Andrew Cernan, an American astronaut, was the last man to walk on the moon in 1972.
The new lunar missions comes as Nasa seeks to resume human space missions from American soil for the first time since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.
Vice President Mike Pence in March announced an accelerated timeline for Nasa to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, cutting in half a previous goal to get there by 2028.
President Donald Trump's own support for the mission has been unclear.
In June, the president urged Nasa to focus instead on "much bigger" initiatives like going to Mars, undercutting his previous stated support for the lunar initiative
