President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday establishing the United States Space Academy, a proposed NASA-led institution intended to train the next generation of astronauts, engineers, and service members for careers in space.
Trump signed the order at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, during an event where he also presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four-member crew of Artemis II, which flew around the moon earlier this year in a mission that helps set the stage for a planned 2028 lunar landing.
“It’s called the U.S. Space Academy,” Trump told the gathered astronauts, engineers, and NASA staff. “That’s a big deal. So 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 the Space Force. We’re going to have an academy for what the people in this room love the most.”
The order establishes a Presidential Commission on the United States Space Academy, chaired by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, with the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy serving as vice chairs. The commission also includes the Secretary of War, the White House chief of staff, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the national security adviser, and the Secretary of the Air Force.
Under the order, the commission has 120 days to deliver a report recommending how the academy should be governed, including whether it should be housed within NASA; what its academic and leadership curriculum should look like; what service obligations graduates would owe, whether in the armed forces or civilian federal service; prerequisites for applicants, including citizenship and security-clearance requirements; and a process for selecting the academy’s permanent physical location. Neither the order nor Trump’s remarks indicated where the academy might ultimately be built.
The order describes the academy as “a proposed NASA-led Federal academy dedicated to combining rigorous technical education with leadership development, discipline, and a durable commitment to public service,” intended to produce “a professional corps of civically grounded leaders prepared to advance American interests within the space domain.”
Trump said he wants the academy to be built to a high standard. “It’ll attract, train and graduate the very, very best of our nation,” he said, adding that even its architecture “has to be top line” and “beautiful.”
The order is the latest in a string of Trump administration space-policy actions, following a December 2025 order titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority” and an Aug. 20 memorandum on national space transportation policy. During Friday’s event, Trump also said NASA has begun work on a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft intended for use in a planned 2028 mission to Mars.
The Space Force, which Trump established as the newest U.S. military branch during his first administration in 2019, has grown to roughly 9,400 active-duty Guardians. If eventually built, the new Space Academy would join the nation’s existing service academies: the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.; the U.S. Naval Academy, serving the Navy and Marine Corps, in Annapolis, Md.; the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.; the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.; and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y.
