Donald Trump made his first public appearance in a week on Tuesday to announce that the US Space Command (Spacecom) headquarters, which is tasked with leading national security operations in space, would be in the Republican stronghold of Alabama.
Flanked by Republican senators and members of Congress at a White House news conference, Trump said Huntsville, Alabama, would be the new location of the space command. The move reverses a Biden administration decision to put the facility at its current temporary headquarters in Democratic-leaning Colorado.
“The US Space Command headquarters will move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama, forever to be known from this point forward as Rocket City,” Trump said. “We had a lot of competition but Alabama’s getting it.”
The move would result in more than 30,000 new jobs and bring hundreds of billions of dollars to Alabama, a state which voted for Trump “by about 47 points”, the president said.
“They fought harder for it than anyone else,” Trump claimed, before adding that Colorado’s decision to allow mail-in voting was “corrupt”.
“The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, [is that] they do mail-in voting,” he said. “So they have automatically crooked elections and we can’t have that. When a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections. So that played a big factor.”
Huntsville is already home to the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight center and the 38,000-acre Redstone Arsenal. The city was identified by the US air force as its preferred site for Space Command in 2021 as it would be a cost-effective option. A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) later found that the air force’s decision-making process had “significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility”.
Two years later, in 2023, Biden overturned those plans to relocate to Alabama. Instead, Biden chose to make the then temporary Colorado Springs location permanent, taking a recommendation from Gen James Dickinson, the former head of Space Command. Dickinson reportedly said relocating to Alabama could jeopardize military readiness as making the headquarters fully operational would take time.
“For FOUR YEARS, I have fought to get U.S. Space Command moved to its SELECTED home at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama,” Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote alongside a video statement after Trump’s announcement. “Thank you, President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, for reversing Joe Biden’s political cronyism and restoring MERIT and INTEGRITY to this process.”
Tuberville lambasted Biden’s 2023 decision to keep Spacecom in Colorado Springs in his video and said the former president let the “nation’s security [take] a backseat to politics” and “caved” to “woke politics” at the time. He then thanked Trump for “restoring merit and integrity” to space exploration and alleged the move would save taxpayers $480m.
Trump’s announcement of a change of course followed days of fevered online speculation about his health, fueled by his absence from the public eye since last week.
Asked if he was aware that there had been 1.3m social media engagements as of Saturday morning speculating on his possible “demise”, Trump countered that he had held several news conferences in the past week and pointed to some “pretty poignant” posts he had made on his Truth Social platform.
“I did numerous news conferences, all successful. They went very well, like this is going very well. And then I didn’t do any for two days, and they said, ‘There must be something wrong with him,’” he said.
“Biden wouldn’t do them for months, you wouldn’t see him, and nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him – and we know he wasn’t in the greatest of shape. It’s all fake news.”
Speculation about Trump’s health has recently intensified. Some of the fervor has been spurred by a White House disclosure that he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition involving damage to the veins in the arms and legs. There has also been viral pictures showing Trump with swollen ankles and bruising on his hands.
Elsewhere in his announcement, Trump indicated that he had decided to send armed troops into Chicago, allegedly to fight crime. Such a move is against the will of JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, and follows the recent controversial deployment of national guard forces in Washington on the same purported basis.
“We’re going in,” he said, calling Chicago and Baltimore – another Democratic-run city – “hellholes”.
He said the deployment of national guard troops in Washington DC had “served as a template,” adding: “I’m very proud of Washington. [It’s] a safe zone.”
