Trump Creates Space Academy, Vows To Return Astronauts to Lunar Surface ‘Before the End of My Term’

President Trump has signed an executive order to create the nation’s first United States Space Academy, aiming to train the next generation of astronauts, engineers, and service members as the country intensifies its ambitions in space.The president announced the new academy during a Friday ceremony at NASA’s Johnson Space Center at Houston, where he also awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission, which flew around the moon earlier this year.“Given the rapid growth of the Space Force and the commerce space industry and the expansion of our ambitions to the moon and far beyond the moon,” Mr. Trump said, “it’s clear we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators.” According to the executive order, the academy will be shaped by a presidential commission led by the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, who has been tasked with exploring options to house the institution within NASA. The commission has 120 days to deliver a report to the president with recommendations on governance, curriculum, service obligations for graduates, and the academy’s permanent location.Mr. Isaacman framed the initiative as pivotal to the country’s future in space. “President Trump’s vision for a new academy is a transformational step to educate the engineers, scientists, technicians, operators, and even the astronauts who will be necessary for the inspiring future we are pursuing in space,” he said in a NASA statement. “I have no doubt that so much of the future talent that will graduate and contribute to these exciting endeavors will be educated at the United States Space Academy.”Mr. Trump reiterated his ambition that “before the end of my term, American astronauts will return to the lunar surface. And when we do, they’ll plant this very important flag to mark the site of the first permanent American settlement on the moon.”On Sunday, the president congratulated NASA after it launched a rocket carrying the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, a $4.3 billion wide field lens that aims to “generate never-before-seen images, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe” in the hunt for new planets, according to NASA.The president said the academy will serve both NASA, a civilian agency, and the United States Space Force, the military branch he established in 2019. He compared its future significance to that of West Point and the Coast Guard Academy, though key details remained unclear from the order itself. The president said he would choose a location “very shortly.”The move comes as NASA faces a proposed 25 percent budget cut in its 2027 request, though House appropriators have released a draft bill rejecting most of those reductions. It also follows a recent Trump administration space policy expanding the number of rocket launches, part of what the president repeatedly calls a “golden age” of space travel.The idea of a dedicated Space Force academy has circulated among lawmakers for years and appeared in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report. When the Space Force was created, its officers trained alongside Air Force cadets in Colorado rather than at a standalone institution. In 2025, 93 cadets from the Air Force Academy were commissioned into the Space Force, roughly 10 percent of the graduating class.During his Houston remarks, Mr. Trump also revealed that NASA has begun work on a nuclear-powered “interplanetary spacecraft” for a planned 2028 mission to Mars, describing it as among the first of “a massive American Star fleet.”“Our nation will conquer and we will conquer, indeed, this vast frontier that we have before us,” Trump said. “We will explore it, tame it and we will win it.”

Trump Creates Space Academy, Vows To Return Astronauts to Lunar Surface ‘Before the End of My Term’

Trump Creates Space Academy, Vows To Return Astronauts to Lunar Surface ‘Before the End of My Term’

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