President Trump announced a new military Space Academy during a Houston visit Friday, then traded jokes with astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
Trump, 78, unveiled the academy at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, saying it would rival West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy and the Coast Guard Academy. The president said he would choose a campus location “very shortly” and promised the school would be “top line” with tough admission standards and a “beautiful” campus.
“We’re going to have an academy for what the people in this room love the most. That’s exciting. That’s really exciting, and I’m going to be choosing a location very shortly,” Trump said at the NASA Johnson Space Center.
“You think of West Point, and you think of Annapolis, and you think of the Air Force Academy and you think of the Coast Guard Academy. It’s great. They’re all great, but we’re going to have now a Space Force [academy].”
Trump said the new university “will serve both the United States Space Force as well as NASA and the civilian spaceflight industry, and it will attract, train, and graduate the very best of our nation.” He tied the announcement to his broader space ambitions, including a permanent moon base and eventual Mars travel.
“I said, ‘I’ll do it, but it’s got to be top line,'” he added. “It’s got to be the equivalent of the others, which are great. You know, they’re among the hardest schools to get into. You know, you talk about the Ivy League schools. It’s tougher to get into West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy — Coast Guard too.”
The president was in Houston to present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four-person crew of the Artemis II mission, which in April traveled around the moon and set a new record distance from Earth for a manned space mission.
Trump joked that a political summit at his Charlottesville, Va., winery “was a disaster” because of the excitement generated by the Artemis crew’s return. After a TV set was wheeled into the room, guests were “so excited” that “nobody did anything, so it was a total waste of time.”
After presenting medals to the Artemis team, Trump called the International Space Station to speak with the three American astronauts on board. The current crew also includes three Russians and a member from Japan.
“I want to get a mustache like that,” Trump told astronaut Jack Hathaway.
“Absolutely, sir. I appreciate it. Yeah, the mustache is a lot of fun. You definitely have to have one in space. It’s, it’s great in microgravity,” Hathaway replied. The Naval Academy graduate praised Trump’s Space Academy proposal, saying, “America’s leadership in the space program is is incredible.”
ISS commander Jessica Meir told Trump about how the space station’s team spoke “crew to crew” with the Artemis astronauts during their mission.
“It made us all incredibly connected and incredibly proud for what we have accomplished as a country and as an international program,” she said.
In the viral moment that capped the event, the lighthearted exchange about Hathaway’s mustache and microgravity quickly drew attention online, with the astronaut’s earnest endorsement of facial hair in space providing a memorable footnote to Trump’s major policy announcement.
The Artemis II crew’s April mission around the moon had set a new record for human distance from Earth, making their subsequent medal ceremony a natural centerpiece for Trump’s space-focused Texas visit.
Trump said he will announce the chosen location for the Space Academy campus in the coming weeks.