Trump signs an order to design a U.S. Space Academy at Johnson Space Center

President Donald Trump signed an executive order at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on 28 August that starts the work of building a United States Space Academy, a NASA-led federal school meant to train civilians and service members for jobs in the civil, military and commercial space sector. The order does not open a campus. It creates a Presidential Commission on the United States Space Academy, gives it 120 days to deliver a design, and names NASA administrator Jared Isaacman as chair.

NASA deputy administrator Matt Anderson is the commission’s executive director. The report must cover governance, curriculum, applicant rules, the service obligation graduates would owe, a process for picking a permanent location, pilot programmes, a legislative path and an implementation plan. NASA pays the cost of publishing the order. Congress would still have to write the statute that actually founds the school and funds it.

Trump framed the need in workforce terms. The Space Force has grown, commercial launch has multiplied, and Artemis is moving past a lunar flyby. “We will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators,” he said in Houston. NASA’s own release, numbered 26-069, placed the proposed academy at Johnson Space Center. That is a starting address, not a final one. The commission is explicitly told to propose how a permanent site should be chosen.

Officials familiar with Isaacman’s Project Athena plan say the model is closer to a tuition-free federal academy than to a conventional university. Graduates would owe several years of service. They could join the Space Force. Most seats, those officials said, would be reserved for NASA and other civilian posts. Ars Technica reported that the school is not intended as a fifth armed-service academy in the West Point sense. The White House fact sheet still uses the service-academy language of discipline, leadership and public duty.

The Houston event doubled as a ceremony for Artemis II. Trump presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four astronauts who flew around the Moon earlier this year: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. The pairing was deliberate. The administration is tying a new training pipeline to a crew that has already left Earth’s orbit under the current programme.

Two earlier space orders sit behind this one. In December 2025 Trump signed Ensuring American Space Superiority. On 20 August he issued a National Space Transportation Policy memorandum. The academy commission is the personnel piece. Rockets and policy memos do not produce flight controllers, range officers or civil spacecraft managers at the volume the administration says it wants.

What the 120-day paper must settle is the hard inventory. How many students. Which degrees. Whether a midshipman-style pay and uniform system applies to civilians. How faculty are hired when NASA salaries compete with SpaceX and Blue Origin. Which existing NASA internships and ROTC-style space programmes get folded in, and which get closed. The order leaves those choices to the commission and then to the President and Congress.

Federal academies are slow to stand up. West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy each needed land, a statutory charter and a first class that took four years to graduate. A NASA academy that tries to feed the 2029 and 2030 flight manifests will miss them. Its first graduates, if the statute passes in 2027 and a pilot class enters the same year, would arrive in the early 2030s. That is the useful horizon against which to read Friday’s signature.

Until the report lands, the United States Space Academy is a commission, a Houston photo and a 120-day clock.