U.S. Space Command headquarters will move to Alabama, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday, reversing a Biden-era decision to keep the command in Colorado.
“I’m thrilled to report that the U.S. Space Command headquarters will move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama,” Trump said during a televised press event at the White House.
The announcement ends a years-long political battle over SPACECOM’s headquarters, which has been operating at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado since 2019. Trump picked Huntsville to house the command at the end of his previous term—a decision the Biden administration reversed in 2023.
Since then, Republican lawmakers from Alabama have been eagerly waiting for Trump to move the command, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision was “politically driven” since multiple reviews pointed to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama as the desired location.
Surrounded by a group of Alabama lawmakers in the Oval Office, Trump said, “We love Alabama. I only won it by about 47 points. [Note: Trump won the state by 30 points in 2024.] I don’t think that influenced my decision.”
He said his decision was affected by Colorado’s use of “all mail-in voting.” Eight states and Washington, D.C., allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.
“We can’t have that when a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections, because that’s what that means. So that played a big factor,” the president said.
Trump has long bashed mail-in voting, but elections experts say the method is quite secure, thanks to multiple levels of checks. “Mail voting malfeasance is exceptionally rare,” according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center.
He said the move will result in 30,000 jobs for Alabama and billions of dollars in investment, and that the command will play a key role in building the wildly ambitious missile defense shield called Golden Dome.
Biden officials and Colorado lawmakers have long argued that moving the command from Colorado Springs would cause the command to lose civilian employees and waste taxpayer dollars. Then-SPACECOM commander Gen. Jim Dickinson was worried that most of the command’s 1,000 civilians wouldn’t move to Alabama and advised then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to keep the command in Colorado Springs, according to an April report from the Defense Department’s inspector general.
Trump downplayed concerns about losing employees, and said if that happens, “we’ll get somebody else.”
Redstone Arsenal is already home to several agencies, including the Army’s space and missile defense command, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
The April DOD IG report found that it would be cheaper to headquarter the command in Alabama due to lower personnel and construction costs. Ultimately, the DOD IG report could not say why Colorado was chosen over Alabama due, its authors said, to a lack of access to Kendall and other senior defense officials.
In a joint statement today, Colorado lawmakers condemned the decision and said it will “directly harm our state and the nation” and that the delegation is “united in fighting to reverse this decision.”
