President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the U.S. Space Command headquarters will move from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.
The president’s decision reverses Joe Biden’s 2023 move to keep the command permanently based in Colorado, where it had achieved full operational capacity.
“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 declared during a press conference in the Oval Office, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and members of Alabama’s congressional delegation. “We had a lot of competition for this and Alabama’s getting it.”
Trump said the relocation of the Space Command will bring up to 30,000 jobs to the area.
While some oppose the move, given the amount of capital already invested in Colorado, others maintain that Huntsville is the perfect location, Fox News reported.
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.
SPACECOM was originally created in September 1985 to provide joint command and control of all military forces in outer space and coordinate with the other combatant commands. After operating for nearly 17 years, it was shut down in 2002.
Trump reestablished SPACECOM in 2019 as a full unified combatant command, with full responsibilities for space.
The president also revealed during the presser that the U.S. military had carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against “a drug-carrying boat” from Venezuela.
“When you leave the room, you’ll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally, shot a boat — a drug-carrying boat,” Trump told reporters. He added there were “a lot of drugs” on the vessel.
The military announced last week that it was boosting its maritime force in the waters off Venezuela to combat threats from Latin American drug cartels.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the operation on X Tuesday, describing it as a “lethal strike,” and saying the boat was operated by a “designated narco-terrorist organization.”
“As @potus just announced moments ago, today the U.S. military conducted a lethal strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela and was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization,” Rubio wrote.