Nasamay be too old and too bureaucratic to reach the Moon within five years, astronauts who flew on the Apollo mission and members of mission control have warned.

In March, Mike Pence, the US Vice President, called for a human return to the Moon by 2024, dramatically accelerating the agency’s space exploration plans.

At the time, Pence said a ‘new sense of urgency’ similar to that of the Apollo was needed, to make sure the next moonwalkers would be ‘Americans, launched by American rockets, from American soil.”

But Gerry Griffin, 84, flight director for the Apollo programme, said the organisation had grown too old, and was lacking leadership for a new mission.

“One of the major keys to Apollo success was leadership," he said. "And Nasa has lost it now. Any organisation as it grows older is subject to too many decisions not made at the right level.

"In Apollo we pushed the decisions down. There was that trust. As we get older every organisation wants to pull up decisions to the level where frankly they don’t have the right skills to make those decisions.

"Apollo had a clear goal which kept us together. We didn’t know we couldn’t do it. The people at Nasa right now, they need to be given a goal."