Trump Signs an Order Creating a U.S. Space Academy. Nobody Knows Yet Where It Will Be.
The executive order, signed at Johnson Space Center, would build a fourth service academy for the Space Force, NASA and the commercial launch industry. Ted Cruz is already lobbying to put it in Texas.
President Trump signed an executive order Friday directing the creation of a U.S. Space Academy, a federal undergraduate institution intended to feed officers and engineers into the Space Force, NASA and the private launch industry. He signed it at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, during a ceremony that had been convened for a different purpose entirely: awarding the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the crew of Artemis II.
Trump framed the academy as the fourth pillar of a system that has trained American officers for more than two centuries. "You think of West Point, and you think of Annapolis, and you think of the Air Force Academy," he said, before adding that the country would now have one for space. He said the school had to be "top line" and equivalent to the existing academies, and that its job would be to "attract, train and graduate the very best of our nation."
What the order does not do is say where the school will go. The administration has not selected a site, and the campaign to land it is already underway. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has been pressing the case for his state, a lobbying effort Trump acknowledged from the stage with a joke: "Just leave me alone, Ted, please, leave me alone." The Air Force Academy, the most recent of the three existing federal academies, was authorized by Congress in 1954 and took years to site and build in Colorado Springs — a precedent that suggests the Space Academy is a decade-long construction project, not a ribbon-cutting.
The medals were the emotional center of the event. Trump presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four Artemis II astronauts: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Wiseman turned the moment toward the people who stayed behind. "It is pride for the grit that our families had when we left this planet," he said.
Trump also used the appearance to make sweeping claims about the state of the agency he inherited, saying NASA was "absolutely closed" when he was elected, and pointing to the Artemis program and plans for a permanent lunar base as evidence of a turnaround. NASA was not closed; it flew Artemis I in late 2022 and never suspended operations. He closed the visit with a call to the International Space Station, speaking with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway and Anil Menon.
An executive order can direct planning, but it cannot by itself create a degree-granting federal academy or the appropriations to run one. West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy were each established by acts of Congress, and each carries a statutory admissions system built around congressional nominations. Turning Friday's order into a campus with cadets will require lawmakers to write that structure — and to decide, eventually, which state gets it.
Originally reported by CBS News.