Updated at 6:21 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025.
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he is reviving a plan to permanently base Space Command in Huntsville, Alabama.
“I am thrilled to report that the U.S. Space Command Headquarters will move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama,” Trump said, surrounded by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance and Alabama lawmakers, and noting that he won the state by 47 points, before adding, “I don’t think that influenced my decision.”
Trump noted he initially chose Alabama as the home of Space Command, “yet those plans were wrongfully obstructed by the Biden administration, and as you know, they moved them to a different locale.”
The command has been operating from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs since Trump revived it in 2019. It achieved full operational capacity there in late 2023.
While Trump thanked Colorado, he cited a non-military reason for playing a big factor in moving the command to Alabama. “The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting … so they have automatically crooked elections.”
Audits and investigations have repeatedly confirmed the accuracy and security of Colorado’s vote.
Trump was praised by Alabama lawmakers for moving the headquarters to their state. Sen. Tommy Tuberville went so far as to hint it would be named for Trump. “We look forward to building a huge space command and having the Donald J. Trump Space Command Center in Huntsville, Alabama.”
Alabama lawmakers accused Biden of making a political decision when he announced during his term that Space Command would stay in Colorado. It’s the same argument that Colorado lawmakers lobbed against Trump when he initially made the decision to place the command in Huntsville in 2021.
No timeline for the move was given, but Alabama Rep. Dale Strong said construction of a new headquarters would take around “14 to 18 months.”
Colorado lawmakers criticize the move
In a joint statement, Colorado’s full Congressional delegation said the move will weaken national security at the “worst possible time.”
"Moving Space Command sets our space defense apparatus back years, wastes billions of taxpayer dollars, and hands the advantage to the converging threats of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” the delegation said in a statement. “The Department of Defense Inspector General’s office has reported multiple times that moving the Command will impede our military’s operational capability for years.”
The delegation said Colorado Springs is the appropriate home for the command and “we will take the necessary action to keep it there.”
They added that many of the current workers that the Space Command relies on might not move. Trump was asked about that and dismissed those concerns, saying the military would find someone else.
During a press conference, Bennet said the move was a “blatantly political decision."
Trump’s comments during the press conference, Bennet said, “made clear that in making his decision, he was rewarding his political friends and allies. His comment about winning Alabama by 47 points says it all.”
Gov. Jared Polis called the decision disappointing and wrong. He said it would be “diminishing military readiness and national security and eroding the trust Americans have in our country and its leaders to do the right thing.”
He added that Coloradans and Americans should get full transparency on how this “poor decision” was made.
Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade described the decision as “deeply disappointing,” but not surprising.
“We have long understood this would be a priority of the Trump administration,” he said in a statement. “Looking forward, we remain hopeful. The space enterprise is growing rapidly, and Colorado Springs, already a global leader in space, will continue to see new opportunities for expansion and growth of our military capacity.”
GOP Rep. Jeff Crank, who represents Colorado Springs in Congress, also tried to put a positive spin on the decision, saying over social media that he’s “confident this is not an across-the-board move and that important assets and jobs related to the Space Command mission will remain in El Paso County.”
Still, the move will likely be a hit to the city and the state’s economy. The governor's office pointed out that in 2024, the state added more than 3,500 new aerospace and defense jobs. And during the announcement, Trump said the move will result in “more than 30,000 Alabama jobs” and "hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.”
As others said, the announcement was not unexpected, but Colorado’s members of Congress, Republicans in particular, had tried to head off the change.
In a joint letter to Trump in April asking him not to relocate operations, Colorado’s four GOP congress members stressed that "transferring the Command at such a turbulent time would jeopardize our national security, needlessly put American lives at risk, and create an unnecessary waste of taxpayer resources.”
Reps. Jeff Crank, Lauren Boebert, Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd wrote that the national security situation had changed since Trump first announced his intent to move the command to Alabama in January 2021. “Moving USSPACECOM would create a self-inflicted vulnerability at a time when foreign adversaries like the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Iran, and Russia are increasingly assertive, and when conflicts in the Middle East demand sustained vigilance,” they wrote.
Still, the plea from Colorado Republicans seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.
Prior to Trump’s announcement, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said his office “has been preparing” for such “an unlawful decision to move Space Command HQ.”
“If the Trump administration takes this step — I’m prepared to challenge it in court,” Weiser said in a statement. It is unclear what kind of legal recourse would be available to Colorado, since the president as commander-in-chief has broad decision making powers and Congress has power of the purse when it comes to basing decisions.
Members of the delegation said they were prepared to fight, but gave no specifics on what that would look like.
“I think that we are going to continue to leave no stone unturned,” Bennet said.
“I'm certainly going to talk to the other senators and explore what ways there are (to revisit the decision),” Sen. John Hickenlooper said. “Obviously, there's endless processes by which the federal government funds these types of things.”
Rep. Strong, who represents Huntsville, however, sees the decision as final.
“I think it’s a done deal. This right here (the president’s announcement) is the final hurdle,” he said. “We’ve wanted a lot of time. I think that it's time to move.”
He added that Colorado and Alabama have a lot of commonalities. “They’re both high tech communities. They’re highly educated and they do a lot for national security… The thing that we want to do is we want to welcome our friends from Colorado that may choose to take these jobs.”
A back-and-forth that has spanned three administrations
Trump’s decision to move the command marks the latest twist in a saga that has lasted years.
During the final week of his first term in office, Trump decided to award the permanent Space Command headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama, reportedly over the recommendation of U.S. Air Force generals to keep it in Colorado Springs.
After leaving office, Trump told an Alabama radio show that he “single-handedly” decided to move the command to the state. For many Colorado officials, it was proof that he’d made the decision for political reasons, not national security ones. Alabama voted for Trump twice, Colorado supported his Democratic opponents.
Once Biden was in office, Colorado lawmakers urged him to revisit the basing decision, pointing to flaws in the methodology for ranking finalist locations and noting that the key factor of full operational capability was not weighed accurately.
After more than two years of review, in July 2023, Biden reversed Trump’s decision to move the command to Alabama, out of concern it could put military readiness at risk, among other factors.
However, with President Trump’s victory last November, many expected him to revisit the basing decision and return to his original selection.
A statement from the Pentagon said the administration followed “a thorough and deliberate evaluation process” and had input from senior military leaders in deciding to keep the command in Colorado Springs.
