President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday establishing the U.S. Space Academy, an institution he says will be the next U.S. military academy focused on training astronauts, engineers, scientists, and warfighters to lead the country into the future of space exploration and defense.
Trump’s executive order creates a White House commission on the matter with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman as the chairman. The order tasks the commission with a 120-day timeline to submit a proposal to Trump for the leadership structure, curriculum, and organizational details of the new academy.
Recommended Stories
“It’s clear we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators,” Trump said while speaking at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The president reflected on his 2019 move to establish the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces. He noted that this proposed military service academy comes alongside “the rapid growth of the Space Force and the commercial space industry and the expansion of our ambitions to the moon and far beyond the moon.”
“You think of West Point, and you think of Annapolis, and you think of the Air Force Academy, and you think of the Coast Guard academies. Great, they’re all great. But we’re going to have now a Space Force — we’re going to have an academy for what the people in this room love the most,” Trump said to the room full of astronauts.
NASA HEAD FLOATS SENDING DATA CENTERS TO SPACE
During his visit to the Johnson Space Center, Trump also awarded Congressional Space Medals of Honor to the Artemis II crew astronauts who made history this year by setting the record for the farthest mankind has traveled from Earth as they flew around the moon.
Trump presented the award to crew members Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen on Friday.
