The debate over where U.S. Space Command’s headquarters should be located is back on the front burner as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said he plans to move the Command out of Colorado Springs, following a new report on the matter.
After the Government Accountability Office said in a report in May that Huntsville, Ala., was the preferred location for Space Command headquarters, HASC chair, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), said he was looking “forward to working with the Trump Administration to rectify yet another one of Biden’s national security blunders.”
The GAO report, which was commissioned by Rogers, came at a time of rising tensions in space, and in the midst of a referendum in Colorado Springs to decide if the city should annex some 1,900 acres of land (3 square miles) east of the city, where a Colorado Springs developer plans to build housing and other services near Schriever Space Force Base.
A project statement for the annexation says the 6,500 dwellings, offices, light industrial and commercial/retail units planned for Karman Line would “serve the traveling/commuting public, area residents, and the employees and enlisted soldiers (sic)” at Schriever.
Although Space Command and Space Force work closely together, they are separate entities. But moving hundreds of guardians and jobs for civilian space professionals to Huntsville could impact Colorado Springs’ development trends.
The developer of Karman Line was contacted for comment but had not replied by press time.
Ready to take on aggression in space
Moving the Command to Alabama would save millions of dollars, reports said, but could also impact readiness, which in military terms means being prepared and able to fulfill missions, including combat operations.
Ever since President Donald Trump, with just one week to go in his first term, said Space Command should leave Peterson Space Force Base for Huntsville, officials in Colorado have resisted the idea, citing heightened tensions in space and how the disruption of relocating was likely to impact readiness.
Those tensions and the importance of readiness were highlighted a week before the GAO report was released, when a Russian satellite, possibly “equipped with a kinetic weapon,” drew “intense scrutiny from the U.S. Space Command” as it moved into a co-orbital path with a U.S. surveillance satellite, Israel-based Sustainability Times reported.
Four Russian satellites in five years have entered an orbit at the same or very similar distance from Earth as U.S. optical reconnaissance satellites, leading “experts to theorize that Russia may be developing a fleet of satellites designed to shadow and, if necessary, disable critical U.S. space assets,” the publication said.
Several Colorado officials said Trump’s decision was motivated by the fact that Alabama voted for him in 2020 while Colorado did not.
In 2024, Alabama again voted for Trump and Colorado for Harris.
Hundreds of staff needed
Peterson has been the headquarters of Space Command since it was officially reestablished as a unified combatant command in 2019. The Command had existed from 1985 until 2002, when it was dissolved by the George W. Bush administration to free up resources to create U.S. Northern Command, also based at Peterson, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Frank Kendall, the Secretary of the Air Force under Biden, said in September 2023 that Space Command needed a workforce of 1,450 personnel, a majority of whom would be civilians.
The logical decision is to keep the Command at Peterson. – Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO)
Several Space Command and industry leaders have said finding staff with space skills is easier in Colorado Springs than in Huntsville because of the high concentration of aerospace and military employers in Colorado’s second biggest city.
Gen. James H. Dickinson, Space Command’s leader from 2020 to 2025, said he feared that “most of the 1,000 civilians, contractors, and reservists” working for the Command in Colorado Springs “will not relocate to another location,” according to a report released in April by the Department of Defense Inspector General.
Huntsville is home to a NASA facility and numerous aerospace companies, and it’s unclear that any studies have been done to determine in which city it would be easier to find staff who are highly knowledgeable about space.
But being fully staffed is essential to readiness, and a White House official said the biggest factor in President Joe Biden’s announcement in July 2023 that Space Command would stay in Colorado Springs was the “impact a move would have to operational readiness to confront space-enabled threats.”
Yet, in his statement after the release of the GAO report in May, Rogers said Biden’s concerns about readiness were “fictional.”
But Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), who represents the district that includes Colorado Springs in Congress, sided with the Democratic former president, saying in a statement sent to the Pikes Peak Bulletin: “There is no debate that moving SPACECOM would cause a serious loss of operational capability for years at a time where the space-based threat from Russia and China is only growing.”
“The logical decision is to keep the Command at Peterson to avoid weakening our homeland defense and to protect the institutional knowledge that Space Command relies on,” Crank said.
Interstate wrangling blocks progress
Wherever it ends up, Space Command will need a new building to house it. Building temporary facilities in Alabama, with the same capacity and security as those in Colorado Springs, would take three to four years, the GAO report said. But construction can’t begin until Space Command gets a permanent home.
Currently, the Command operates out of two buildings on Peterson and Schriever Space Force Bases, and two commercial properties.
If it stays in Colorado Springs, a new headquarters building will have to be built. Construction was supposed to start in 2029 but a provision added to the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act by Alabama Republican Dale Strong barred Space Command from renting, planning, designing, or constructing new facilities in Colorado Springs until the results of the IG and GAO reports were known.
Both reports have been published but the final location of Space Command’s HQ remains up in the air. Bouncing around with it in the turbulence are questions about how moving Space Command to Huntsville might impact Karman Line and other development projects, and how job numbers in Colorado Springs might be affected.
