Trump Signs Order to Create U.S. Space Academy, Modeled After Military Service Institutions

President Trump stood in a cavernous training facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday and signed an executive order to establish a U.S. Space Academy—a federal institution designed to feed talent into the Space Force, NASA, and the commercial spaceflight sector. The announcement came during a ceremony honoring the Artemis II crew with Congressional Space Medals of Honor, a moment Trump used to frame the academy as a capstone achievement for American spaceflight ambition. "Space is the hot thing," he told the assembled astronauts, engineers, and NASA managers, positioning the new academy alongside the nation's most storied military institutions. "You think of West Point, and you think of Annapolis, and you think of the Air Force Academy. But we're going to have now the Space Force. We're going to have an academy for what the people in this room love the most."

The academy will be modeled on the structure and prestige of the military service academies, with Trump emphasizing that it must be "top line" and "the equivalent of the others, which are great." Its stated mission is to "attract, train and graduate the very best of our nation." What remains unresolved is where the institution will be located, what its curriculum will look like, and precisely how civilian spaceflight companies will access its graduates. The Trump administration has not yet selected a site, though the president acknowledged that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is actively lobbying for the academy to be built in his home state. Trump joked about the pressure, telling Cruz to "leave me alone," while also noting that "everybody wants it because it's the hot thing."

The four Artemis II astronauts—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor during the ceremony. Hansen became only the second foreign national to receive the award, following Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. Wiseman, accepting on behalf of the crew, reframed the honor as belonging not to the astronauts themselves but to their families' sacrifice, the NASA team that prepared the mission, and the international partners who made the flight possible. The Congressional Space Medal of Honor, established in 1969 with Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong among its first recipients, has now been awarded to 34 astronauts in total, including three Mercury program pioneers and 14 who died in the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

Trump used the occasion to claim credit for reviving American spaceflight. He asserted that when he took office in his first term, "America's endeavors in space had come to a complete halt," that "NASA was closed, absolutely closed," and that the United States had fallen to "number three" behind Russia and China. He stated that the nation had lost the ability to send astronauts to the moon and, under previous administrations, had even lost the capacity to launch astronauts into orbit. He did not mention that the second Bush administration had decided to retire the space shuttle program in 2010, nor did he acknowledge that NASA's commercial crew and cargo programs—which produced SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's Starliner—were established under President Barack Obama. The International Space Station, continuously staffed since 2000 across every presidential administration, was also absent from his accounting.

Trump highlighted his administration's establishment of the Space Force and its commitment to returning astronauts to the lunar surface, with plans for a base near the moon's south pole. "As the world can see today," he said, "under the Trump administration, we have brought back America's space program and came out of the dark age, and it's now into the golden age." After the medal ceremony, he traveled to NASA's mission control center to speak with three NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station—Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Anil Menon—along with European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonauts Andrey Fedyaev, Anna Kikina, and Pyotr Dubrov. Trump told them he would not personally fly to space, joking that he hated to admit it but had no desire to do so. He announced the Space Academy to the crew and promised them an Oval Office visit after their return to Earth the following month.

Trump became the sixth sitting president to speak with astronauts in space and the third to do so from mission control. Ronald Reagan was the first, in 1981, speaking with the second space shuttle crew. Bill Clinton followed in 1994 with another shuttle crew. Richard Nixon had been the first president to speak with astronauts in space when he called Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the White House during the Apollo 11 moon walk in July 1969. George W. Bush and Barack Obama also made such calls from the Oval Office. The Space Academy remains in its earliest stages, with fundamental questions about its structure, location, and relationship to the civilian space industry still unresolved.