Mr Morrison will visit the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Sunday to support a memorandum of understanding the vast US organisation will sign with the Australian Space Agency.

The agreement will transfer Australian science and technology to Mr Trump's controversial plan for astronauts to return to the moon, just as it faces doubts over his ambitious deadline.

White House officials said the goal of the agreement was for a manned mission to return to the moon by 2024 and to revive the cooperation seen decades ago when scientists at Australian tracking stations helped the Apollo lunar missions.

"It's been an incredibly cooperative relationship going back to the Apollo program into the moon landing," a White House official said in a briefing on Mr Morrison's visit to Washington DC.

"And what we're trying to do in this visit is to expand that longstanding cooperation into the next frontiers - the moon and Mars.

"And I think what you'll see is we're going to have some proposals on the table that will further integrate Australia and the United States into conquering those new frontiers."

Mr Trump has ordered the creation of the lunar mission in a program called Artemis to reprise the Apollo landings of the 1960s, but this time putting the first woman on the surface of the moon.

The policy requires NASA to turn its attention to a human mission to Mars once the lunar landing is achieved.

Mr Morrison has named space as one of the themes of his visit to the US in the hope of deepening the economic and defence relationship between the two allies.

"Whether it's new opportunities for our space agency, locking us into a supply chain, to collaborating with businesses and groups in the United States through to the growth in quality critical minerals and rare earths that our miners export, our trading relationship has been diversifying," Mr Morrison said in remarks to the media before he arrived.

"We've got a foot in the door and I want to use this trip to crack it open."