Astronauts and spacesuits from various NASA missions are seen as
Astronauts and spacesuits from various NASA missions are seen as US President Donald Trump waits to speak during a Congressional Space Medal of Honor presentation at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on August 28, 2026. The Artemis II astronauts crew are honored with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor for their historic mission around the Moon. Kent NISHIMURA/Getty Images

Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday creating the framework for a "US Space Academy," an institution he said would be modelled on West Point and built to supply astronauts, engineers and Space Force personnel for what he cast as a rivalry with China, according to a report from Agence France-Presse published by the South China Morning Post. scmp

Speaking at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four Artemis II astronauts, Trump said the school would serve the Space Force, NASA and the civilian spaceflight industry. "It's called the US Space Academy. That's a big deal," he said as he signed the order. scmpscmp

The order does not open a school outright. It establishes a presidential commission tasked with developing the academy, White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios said. Trump did not say where the new academy would be built, though he told the Houston crowd he expected to choose a site "very shortly." Newsweek reported that Houston and Colorado Springs, home to the US Air Force Academy, are among the locations already drawing speculation. scmp

Trump has credited the Space Force, the newest branch of the US military, with an important role in recent American operations in Venezuela and Iran — a characterization that is his own and has not been independently verified. scmp

The announcement landed the same day a Shenzhou-23 crew completed a spacewalk to repair a solar wing on China's Tiangong space station. Astronauts Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan and Li Jiaying finished the roughly 5.5-hour excursion at 1:59pm Beijing time, marking the second time Chinese astronauts have carried out that repair, according to China's Manned Space Agency. The two events were unrelated and unfolded an ocean apart, but their timing put America's newest space institution and China's orbiting repair crew into headlines within hours of each other. China News