President Donald Trump announced today that U.S. Space Command will be located in Alabama.
- “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,” said Trump, flanked by Republican members of Alabama’s congressional delegation, from the Oval Office on Tuesday. “We had a lot of competition for this, and Alabama’s getting it.”
Pensacola Made a Bid in 2020
In 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis formally requested that the U.S. Space Command and Space Force headquarters be placed in Florida. He has continued to strongly advocate for bringing major space operations, including the U.S. Space Command and NASA headquarters, to Florida.
In 2020, FloridaWest put in a bid for the Space Command. We passed the initial criteria: being within the top 150 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the country, located within 25 miles of a military base, and having a minimum score of 50 on the Livability Index published by the American Association of Retired Persons Public Policy Institute.
- Pensacola was among the nine Florida sites that Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed for the headquarters. The others were Jacksonville, Miami-Dade County, Pinellas County, Orange County, Tampa-Hillsborough County, Seminole County, Orange County and Brevard County
We thought Pensacola may have nudged ahead of the pack thanks to the successful recovery of the SpaceX Crew Dragon in early August 2020. But Pensacola also had a long history with spaceflight; around 100 Navy and Marine Corps astronauts trained here, as well as seven of the men who walked on the moon.
In 2020, the Port of Pensacola was home to a ship owned by Blue Origin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ space company, that was being retrofitted to serve as a landing platform for its rockets. Gulf Breeze-based Avalex Technologies designed the interior of Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceliner, SpaceShipTwo.
- Then-FloridaWest CEO Scott Luth pointed out that Pensacola is home to the Navy Information Operations Command, Navy Center for Information Warfare Training, National Security Agency National Cryptologic School, Department of Homeland Security National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center and other critical cybersecurity and training commands. The University of West Florida is one of only six NSA/DHS Center of Academic Excellence Cybersecurity regional hubs.
Mayor Grover Robinson was enthusiastic about the bid. “We have the amenities and assets to do it, and we are realistically in the game in every possible way. You can’t overestimate how important to the future the U.S. Space Force is. Space literally is the final frontier.”
In the end, the Biden administration kept the command in Colorado.
- Optmistic View: Pensacola and Escambia County may see some spin-offs of having the Space Command moved to Huntsville.
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