President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that U.S. Space Command’s headquarters will be relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, following through on a move made in 2021 late in his first term in office that was ultimately overturned by a Biden-era decision to keep it in Colorado.
A person familiar with the decision confirmed the expected announcement to Military.com on Tuesday ahead of a Trump press event scheduled for the afternoon. CBS News and The Associated Press were among the first to report the president would make the headquarters move to Alabama public, and a post by the Pentagon’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service also indicated the press event was related to a “U.S. Space Command HQ Announcement."
Following Trump’s election to a second term in November, Military.com reported that a reversal of the Biden administration’s decision to permanently keep Space Command’s headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was highly likely. Trump’s 2021 decision announcing Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as the preferred location rankled Colorado’s delegation of lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and numerous government probes followed.
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While the move had been anticipated, it’s not clear why the expected announcement took so long to make. White House officials did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.
“The U.S. Space Command headquarters will move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama, forever to be known from this point forward as ‘Rocket City,’” Trump said Tuesday. Notably, Huntsville has been known as Rocket City since at least the 1950s, AL.com reported. The president also claimed the announcement would create 30,000 jobs in the state.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told a Mobile, Alabama, radio station last November that Trump had vowed to reverse the decision on the campaign trail and said the reversal of the decision by President Joe Biden would happen “in the first week that he's in office,” adding that “we will start construction next year in Huntsville."
That soundbite was nearly 10 months ago, and the overall fight to bring Space Command to Alabama has now stretched through three presidential terms and more than four years of political fighting in Congress, the White House and in the Department of the Air Force. Rogers praised the president’s decision in a Tuesday statement on the social media platform X.
“Space Command is finally coming home to Alabama,” Rogers said in the post. “This announcement by President Trump is yet another in a long line of strong decisions that benefit America’s national security.”
Space Command is the combatant command tasked with military operations in space that was reactivated in 2019.
After Trump’s announcement in January 2021, Democrat-requested investigations from the Government Accountability Office and Department of Defense inspector general were released the following year.
The GAO findings detailed an unorganized and unclear process that raised concerns about "significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility," as well as the "appearance of bias" in the decision. The DoD IG probe found that, while the selection process was marred by shoddy recordkeeping, the Huntsville choice was reasonable.
In 2023, Biden announced by executive order that Space Command would keep its headquarters at Peterson in Colorado. Similarly, Republican lawmakers sought DoD IG and GAO probes into that administration’s decision.
Another Department of Defense inspector general’s report in April said there were several unanswered questions as to why the decision was made from the White House and not within the Department of the Air Force. Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were not interviewed, with both citing the need to protect confidential conversations with the president.
In May, a GAO probe revealed that should Space Command stay in Colorado, new construction would be needed to fix significant problems, Military.com previously reported.
"As a result of identified challenges, officials stated the command's posture is not sustainable long term and new military construction would be needed to support the headquarters' operations in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” the GAO found.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Military.com that there are several looming questions ahead of the expected announcement.
“My biggest question going into this announcement is how it will be paid for,” Harrison told Military.com. “And why did it take so long to formalize the decision?”
Trump pointed to Colorado’s existing mail-in voting laws during the press conference, saying they “played a big factor also” in the headquarters-basing decision. Members of Colorado’s delegation in Washington, D.C. – Republicans and Democrats – quickly decried the reversal.
Sen. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, and Reps. Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jason Crow, Brittany Pettersen and Gabe Evans, said in a joint statement that the move “will directly harm our state and the nation,” and will cost billions of dollars.
“Moving Space Command would not result in any additional operational capabilities than what we have up and running in Colorado Springs now,” the statement read. “Colorado Springs is the appropriate home for U.S. Space Command, and we will take the necessary action to keep it there."
Related: Colorado Could Lose US Space Command. Trump Is Expected to Move It to Alabama.
