Trump Creates U.S. Space Academy, Honors 4 Artemis II Astronauts in Houston

Q: With Houston already training astronauts, where will the newly announced U.S. Space Academy ultimately be built to rival West Point?

It has not been decided. Trump said at the Houston signing that the location of the proposed U.S. Space Academy “has not yet been chosen,” so there is no final site yet for the institution he said should one day rival West Point. Houston is an obvious symbolic contender because NASA’s Johnson Space Center already anchors U.S. human spaceflight. It is home to Mission Control, the astronaut corps, and major training facilities such as the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. The city also already hosts student pipeline programs through Space Center Houston that resemble parts of what a space academy could offer. Still, the broader space-education landscape suggests other places could compete if the administration wants to build on existing infrastructure. Huntsville, Alabama, for example, has the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Space Camp, and close ties to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, making it another plausible candidate. Other military or launch-related regions could also emerge depending on whether the academy is designed more as a NASA-linked school, a Space Force commissioning institution, or a hybrid model. At this stage, the key fact is that the academy exists only as an executive-order initiative. No campus, host state, admissions structure, or construction plan has been formally announced.

3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Aug 28

At NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Trump signed an executive order launching a U.S. Space Academy and awarded Congressional Space Medals of Honor to the four Artemis II crew members.
The order sets up a commission chaired by the NASA chief to propose the academy’s structure within 120 days; Trump said the school would feed both NASA and the Space Force, though no site was named.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen were honored for April’s 10-day lunar flyby, which looped around the moon’s far side and set a record for the farthest humans have traveled from Earth.
The Houston ceremony also carried midterm overtones, with speakers praising Trump as his approval ratings remain underwater amid high prices and an unpopular war against Iran.