SPACECOM to Huntsville? Under Trump, bets are on ‘yes,’ and possibly soon

WASHINGTON — Space watchers say the odds are high that President-elect Donald Trump will redirect US Space Command headquarters to Huntsville, Ala., once he is in office — reversing the July 2023 decision by President Joe Biden to keep the command based in Colorado Springs, Co.

“I think it’s a virtual certainty. He can announce it in the first 100 days, but the process will take many years and appropriations from Congress. But I think SPACECOM will end up moving to Huntsville,” said Todd Harrison, a long-time space analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

Those expressing confidence in such a move also include Alabama’s senior Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville.

“Sen. Tuberville has spoken with President Trump several times about the importance of moving Space Command back to its rightful home in Huntsville,” a spokesperson for Tuberville’s office told Breaking Defense.

The spokesperson also pointed to a Nov. 7 interview with Tuberville on WREC radio station’s “Alabama Morning News with JT” show, where the senator stated that Huntsville was the “best place” for SPACECOM HQ due to the level of security there.

“There is no doubt it’s the best place, and it’s secure. They’re not secure out there [in Colorado]. But, again, I’ve told President Trump, listen, get a Secretary of Air Force. Let’s go through this process again—[it’s a] short period of time,” Tuberville said.

“It won’t take long and I know where it’s gonna go. Let’s just do it the right way. Politics don’t need to be involved. It needs to be done for the military and the people of this country,” he added.

Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that plans for making such a move already exist — given that Trump had decided on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville as SPACECOM’s home just before he left the Oval Office for the first time in January 2021.

“It’s a safe bet that Space Command is going to Rocket City. Worth dusting off plans for the 60-acre site previously identified for a new Redstone headquarters,” he told Breaking Defense.

Redstone Arsenal, a US Army post, currently is home to a number of service organizations, including Army Space and Missile Defense Command. It also houses the Missile Defense Agency and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

The SPACECOM basing decision has been a political football between the Alabama and Colorado congressional delegations since 2018, and the subject of investigations in 2022 by both the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Congress’s watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act passed in December 2023, lawmakers blocked funding for additional facilities at the Colorado location and mandated yet another investigation by the OIG, this time into the fairness of Biden’s decision to let the command stay where it was. GAO, likewise, opened another investigation in September 2023.

Nonetheless, then-SPACECOM commander Army Gen. Jim Dickinson on Dec. 15, 2023 declared that the command had reached “full operational capability” at Peterson SFB, including having the necessary infrastructure “to support command and control across mission and business functions.”

In a long thread on LinkedIn over the past week, commenters including current and former military officials raised questions about the costs of moving the headquarters now that it has had time to settle in, as well as the potential effects on mission readiness. One big concern cited was whether there will be a huge brain drain among the civilian workforce because many will not want to move from Colorado Springs.

However, some other analysts keeping eyes on SPACECOM told Breaking Defense that perhaps that expected attrition in personnel would be a good thing — shaking up status quo thinking about the command’s mission, and making room for new blood.