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Tag: Space Command

  • Trump follows through on first-term promise moving Space Command from Colorado to Alabama

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    President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the U.S. Space Command headquarters would relocate from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Huntsville, Alabama.

    In 2018, Trump signed an executive order reestablishing the space command during his first term. In 2023, former President Joe Biden decided to keep the headquarters in Colorado, where it was temporarily located.

    Trump’s announcement Tuesday officially reversed Biden’s decision and is consistent with his original plan.

    “The U.S. Space Command HQ 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 in a press conference.

    President Donald Trump speaks about the relocation of U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025, in Washington. | Mark Schiefelbein

    The decision was criticized by Democrats, who say it will be costly to relocate the headquarters and puts jobs in jeopardy in Colorado.

    Trump said Tuesday that Colorado’s use of mail-in voting was a “big factor” for why the change was happening. Alabama allows absentee ballots that can be requested and returned by mail.

    Alabama, which voted in favor of Trump in all three of the elections he ran in, celebrated the decision with its congressional delegation joining Trump in the Oval Office for the announcement. The relocation is expected to bring jobs and investment to Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal.

    “We had a lot of competition for this and Alabama’s getting it,” Trump said, acknowledging the state’s leaders flanking him on either side.

    The Air Force had previously said Redstone was the preferred location for the headquarters, but officials said new construction would have to happen in Alabama to support the operations already underway in Colorado. The Biden administration opted instead to overturn Trump’s decision and keep operations where they were.

    Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement Tuesday that Trump was playing “political games” with the military’s readiness and their families.

    “Moving Space Command Headquarters to Alabama is not only wrong for our national defense, but it’s harmful to hundreds of Space Command personnel and their families,” Weiser said.

    Donald Trump

    In this Aug. 29, 2019, file photo, President Donald Trump, left, watches with Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary Mark Esper as the flag for U.S. space Command is unfurled as Trump announces the establishment of the U.S. Space Command in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. President Joe Biden has decided to keep U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado, overturning a last-ditch decision by the Trump administration to move it to Alabama and ending months of politically fueled debate, according to senior U.S. officials | Carolyn Kaster

    Weiser said his office had been preparing for Trump to make this announcement and is ready to challenge it in court.

    Trump’s announcement Tuesday was his first televised remarks in a week, since a three-hour Cabinet meeting last Tuesday.

    After several days with no public appearances, there was speculation online about the president’s health. He noted during the press conference that he had an “active” weekend by golfing, posting online and doing an hourlong interview with an outlet.

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  • Trump announces Space Command HQ will switch to Alabama from Colorado

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    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.

    Related: Golden Dome missile defense program won’t be operational by end of Trump’s term

    “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.”

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  • Artel, LLC Delivered the Final Pathfinder 2 Milestone, Initial on-Orbit Test

    Artel, LLC Delivered the Final Pathfinder 2 Milestone, Initial on-Orbit Test

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    HERNDON, Va., March 18, 2024 (Newswire.com)
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    It has now been a year since Artel, LLC launched its Pathfinder 2 program, which has now completed its first six months of on-orbit operations for the United Space. Pathfinder 2 originally completed its final contractual milestone, the Initial on-orbit Test (IoT) in September 2023, which the U.S. Government accepted, completing all program requirements. This included the design, test, launch, and operation of the satellite and transponder, as well as to provide commercial communications Ku-band bandwidth for 15 years. 

    Pathfinder 2 is an initiative between Congress and the United States Space Force (USSF), formally the US Air Force’s Space Command, to move from short-term lease agreements towards long-term investment opportunities for commercial satellite communications (SATCOM). The vision was to host a government owned transponder onboard a commercially owned and operated satellite. Artel was awarded the $19 Million contract on 9 November 2017 to embed the Pathfinder 2 mission on Hispasat’s Amazonas Nexus high throughput satellite, built by Thales Alenia Space. The Pathfinder 2 mission launched in February 2023. This new satellite has coverage over the entire American continent and the North Atlantic corridor (an area with major aerial and maritime traffic). 

    A unique objective was to ensure greater satellite services and introduce cost savings as compared to the traditional short-term space capacity leasing model of the commercial satellites in orbit. For the Pathfinder 2 mission, the Government purchased commercial capacity for 2023-2038 including management of the capacity with no annual sustainment costs. The long-term spend, as an alternative to short-term leasing options, was key to the substantial 70% cost savings. 

    The U.S. Government owns this capacity for the lifespan of the satellite, which is typically 15 years. This capacity can be used for the DoD or any Federal agency, at the U.S. Government’s discretion. Since completing IoT, the Space Force’s Space Delta 8 SATCOM Office at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado has been responsible for planning mission support and managing the Pathfinder 2 capacity for a full array of DoD users. Remarkably, demand for this capacity has been so strong, as of February 2024 it is almost fully utilized.   

    “This mission demonstrates the high degree of partnership between military and commercial acquisition. Pathfinder 2 satisfies warfighter requirements by procuring commercially provided pre-launch transponders and securing bandwidth at a lower total ownership cost,” said Ms. Charlotte Gerhart, Senior Materiel Leader, Acquisition Delta – Tactical SATCOM, Space Systems Command.

    Pathfinder 2 resulted in immediate savings to the government, when on 26 September 2023 at 1600Z, General Atomic’s MQ-1C transitioned to Pathfinder 2 after 20 years of leasing SATCOM capacity one year at a time—or less. Joint Task Force-North (JTF-N) was procuring SATCOM for its mission at an annualized cost of $1.8 million. As a result of Pathfinder 2, their new cost for SATCOM is $0.0. Additionally, Pathfinder 2 also enables industry collaboration between commercial SATCOM capabilities with military SATCOM (MILSATCOM) operations. 

    “The Pathfinder 2 Program is a prime example of Government and Industry collaboration to not only deliver leading-edge technologies, but also through a purchase model saving substantial taxpayer dollars,” stated Ed Spitler, Head of SATCOM Programs for Artel, LLC. Artel, and its partners, were able to overcome several unforeseen challenges during these past five years related to events from the global pandemic to the war in Ukraine. While the world was experiencing supply chain interruptions, product shortages, and facility shut-downs, Artel led the way to persevere and deliver. Pathfinder 2 represents a departure from traditional segregation of military and commercial SATCOM management processes, placing both under the management of the USSF.

    EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – Space Systems Command (SSC) 

    About Space Systems Command

    Space Systems Command (SSC) is the U.S. Space Force field command responsible for acquiring and delivering resilient war fighting capabilities to protect our nation’s strategic advantage in and from space. SSC manages an $15 billion space acquisition budget for the Department of Defense and works in partnership with joint forces, industry, government agencies, academic and allied organizations to accelerate innovation and outpace emerging threats. Our actions today are making the world a better space for tomorrow.

    -30-

    Media representatives can submit questions for response regarding this topic by sending an 

    e-mail to sscpa.media@spaceforce.mil

    About Artel

    Since 1986, Artel has served as a trusted provider of secure IT and network solutions to the U.S. Government. Our telecommunications offerings ensure reliable, secure connectivity worldwide to support our customers’ mission-critical requirements. An International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2015 certified network systems integrator, Artel provides cost-effective, on-time delivery of global terrestrial and satellite network communication services, cyber security, risk management, and technology support services. Please visit www.artelllc.com for additional information. If you would like more information about this topic, please e-mail espitler@artelllc.com. 

    Source: Artel LLC

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