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President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Space Command’s headquarters would move from Colorado to Alabama — capping off a yearslong fight over where the command should be based.
While Space Command has been operating out of Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Trump during his first term pushed for the command’s headquarters to go to Huntsville, Alabama. However, former President Joe Biden announced in 2023 that the command would remain based in Colorado.
“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 told reporters Tuesday.
“This will result in more than 30,000 Alabama jobs,” Trump said. “And probably much more than that, and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. … Most importantly, this decision will help America defend and dominate the high frontier, as they call it.”
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President Donald Trump speaks during a signing ceremony for “Space Policy Directive 4” in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington in 2019.
Speculation that Trump would announce a move to Space Command increased after the agency initially posted a livestream link for Trump’s 2 p.m. Eastern announcement Tuesday with a description that the event was related to Space Command’s headquarters. The description was subsequently updated to remove the mention of Space Command.
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to Fox News that Tuesday’s announcement was related to the Defense Department. (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)
The announcement comes after both Colorado and Alabama have been vying to house Space Command, which Trump reestablished in 2019 as a new combatant command to oversee U.S. military space operations and is currently involved in Trump’s Golden Dome initiative.
“In Huntsville, (Space Command) will play a key role in building the Golden Dome,” Trump said Tuesday. “As you know that’s going to be a big thing. Everybody wants to be a participant in it. Missile defense shield. We’re going to be having a golden dome that the likes of which nobody’s ever seen before…I hope it will also ensure that our technical technological capabilities, of which we’re way ahead of anybody else, is nobody close, remain unmatched long into the future.”
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The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital when asked about Space Command’s headquarters.
Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman, Space Force and Command Senior Enlisted Leader and Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman, with Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett, present President Donald Trump with the official flag of the United States Space Force in 2020. (Photo by Samuel Corum-Pool/Getty Images)
Proponents of keeping Space Command at Colorado’s Peterson Space Force Base argue that it would be costly to move the headquarters, given the investment already put into Peterson to accommodate the command there.
However, the Air Force concluded in 2021 that Army Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, would be the ideal location for U.S. Space Command. The town is also home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.
Meanwhile, a Department of Defense inspector general report released in April could not identify why Colorado was chosen over Alabama.
Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich contributed to this report.