Oppressing China and Russia, squeezing Congress — Trump is pulling off an even bigger move. After establishing the U.S. Space Force during his first term, Trump has now announced the creation of a "West Point-style academy for space," aiming to return Americans to the Moon and eventually reach Mars.
According to Reuters on August 28, U.S. President Trump signed an executive order on the same day establishing the U.S. Space Academy, promoting it as a new dual-use educational institution modeled after elite military academies like West Point.
How will this military school be positioned? What kind of talent will it cultivate? What missions will it serve? “Clearly, we need to train an entire generation of technically skilled service members, engineers, civilian operators, and professionals across all fields,” Trump said, drawing direct parallels with West Point.
Reports indicate that Trump’s establishment of this academy aims to solidify his space agenda — a cornerstone of his political legacy, according to Trump and White House officials. During his first presidential term, he founded the U.S. Space Force and frequently attended NASA launch events. His current objective is to send Americans back to the Moon and ultimately land on Mars.
Strategically, this move first seeks to address critical gaps in the U.S. Space Force’s talent development system. Since its formation, the Space Force has lacked a dedicated officer training institution. Personnel in space-related fields have largely been drawn from the Air Force Academy or general universities, resulting in fragmented curricula and no unified pipeline for leadership development, space warfare, and deep-space engineering integration. The new Space Academy is intended to become the cradle of space officers, cultivating both military combat personnel and deep-space exploration engineers — serving both national defense in space domains and supporting human missions to the Moon and Mars — while bridging talent flows among the military, NASA, and commercial aerospace sectors, thus strengthening America’s human capital foundation in space competition.
Second, the initiative carries strong political narrative intent. Trump views his space agenda as a defining hallmark of his presidency. During his first term, he achieved the 'from zero to one' creation of the Space Force; now, in his second term, he aims to complete the construction of a companion military academy, concretizing goals like returning to the Moon and landing on Mars, thereby shaping a political image of bold pioneering and leadership in a new space era. While executive orders can be issued by the president, actual construction and funding require congressional approval — making this move also a strategic pressure point aimed at securing increased budgets for space and the Space Force, rallying domestic public support for America’s expansionist space strategy.
At a deeper level, this reflects great-power competition for dominance in space. Today, space has become a new front in great-power rivalry, with escalating tensions over orbital control, satellite defense, and deep-space exploration. By establishing targeted institutional education, the U.S. aims to systematically accumulate space technology and operational doctrines, maintaining its comprehensive advantage in space. The dual-use model enables the military to receive space warriors while supplying technical talent to private aerospace companies. Leveraging America’s mature commercial space ecosystem, this approach enables mutual empowerment between military and civilian space sectors, reinforcing its high frontier strategic posture.
Yet, while the vision is grand, implementation faces formidable obstacles. First, funding and partisan gridlock in Congress represent the biggest hurdles. Presidential executive orders can only initiate preliminary research; full financing for campus construction, faculty recruitment, admissions, and operations must pass through Congress. With intense partisan conflict and NASA’s budget repeatedly slashed under pressure from military spending and social expenditures, the massive investment required to build a national-level military academy is highly likely to face congressional resistance — raising serious risks that the project may remain just paper plans.
Second, the foundational infrastructure for the academy essentially starts from zero. Legacy institutions like West Point have accumulated over a century of experience, boasting mature academic systems, experienced faculty, and established training facilities. In contrast, the Space Academy currently only has an eight-member advisory committee, with no campus location set, no curriculum developed, and no qualified teaching staff. Given the rapid pace of technological evolution in space, the curriculum must cover orbital mechanics, aerospace engineering, space warfare, command and management — and the dual military-civilian mission brings inherent contradictions in training objectives. It will take years to develop a viable educational framework. Human capital development inherently requires long cycles: even if construction began immediately, the first graduates would not enter the workforce for many years — far too late to address the urgent shortage of space talent facing the U.S. today.
Third, the external engineering goals themselves are fraught with uncertainty. The academy’s existence is tied to returning to the Moon and reaching Mars — yet America’s lunar missions have repeatedly been delayed, and rocket and landing vehicle projects continue to expose technical and supply chain issues. If deep-space exploration programs keep missing deadlines, the academy’s talent pipeline will shrink, drastically undermining return on investment. Meanwhile, private aerospace firms offer salaries far exceeding those in the military, making it highly likely that top-tier talent cultivated by the academy will be poached by commercial enterprises — posing a severe risk of brain drain.
In summary, the establishment of the Space Academy signifies that the United States has elevated space talent development to a national strategic priority, recognizing that space competition ultimately comes down to talent competition — a direction that is strategically sound. However, institutional constraints, enormous costs, lengthy construction timelines, and uncertain external project outcomes present unavoidable real-world challenges. The initiative holds more symbolic value than immediate practical impact. Whether it will truly materialize and deliver expected results depends heavily on the trajectory of domestic U.S. political struggles. For global dynamics, this further underscores the rising risks of militarization in space, signaling increasingly fierce rule-making battles within the space domain.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1874910380856332/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.