It is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.

The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.

The ambitious plans for commercially exploring space outlined in the documents propose potential new moon landings within the next three years as well as, "private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020."