Emphasizes “Rocket City” Nickname

President Donald Trump announced on September 2 that the U.S. Space Command will relocated from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. The city has a long and rich history going back to the 1950s and Wernher con Braun’s rocket team and has been a major hub for space and defense companies.

President Trump made the announcement in a press conference in the Oval Office. The president said, "I am thrilled to report that the U.S. 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.'”

Huntsville’s history inspired its longtime nickname as “Rocket City,” It is the home of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center as well as the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. It is also where the U.S. military’s earliest rockets and ballistic missiles were built and tested, at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal.

The Marshall Space Flight Center was established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960, and was the site of development of the Mercury-Redstone rocket that launched America’s first astronauts into space. It is also where the Saturn family of rockets was developed that lifted the Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon.

President Trump noted one of the reasons for his decision is Colorado’s mail-in voting system. He said, "The problem I had with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting, they went to all mail-in voting, 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, because that's what that means. So that played a big factor."

Avoiding the political element, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the move in terms of the country’s superiority in space, saying, "We are way ahead in space, but this will ensure we stay leaps and bounds ahead, because that's the most important domain. Whoever controls the skies will control the future of warfare."

U.S. Senator and former college football coach Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said the new headquarters may be named after Trump. He said, "We need help in our military. We need to catch up, and as the secretary said, we we're not behind in space, but we know where we're at. So thank you, Mr. President, for this, and we look forward to building a huge space command and having the Donald J. Trump Space Command Center in Huntsville, Alabama."

FMI:  www.space.com/