On a Friday afternoon in Houston, four astronauts stood at attention while President Donald Trump signed a document that promised, in one stroke, two enormous things: a brand-new national academy for the space age, and a nuclear-powered spacecraft bound for Mars in just two years. The ceremony on August 28, 2026, took place at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where Trump was also there to award the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the crew of Artemis II, the mission that had flown astronauts around the Moon that April.
The order itself does not build a campus or launch a rocket. What it actually does is create a commission with 120 days to figure out whether either of those things is realistic, and who is going to pay for them. That gap, between the announcement on stage and the paperwork behind it, is where this story gets interesting.
A Commission, Not Yet an Academy
The executive order establishes the Presidential Commission on the United States Space Academy, chaired by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, with NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson serving as executive director. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios and National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett sit as vice chairs, and the commission also pulls in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, according to reporting from Defense One.
On stage, Trump framed the idea in familiar terms: an institution meant to sit alongside West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy, but for space. He said the academy would serve NASA, the Space Force, and the commercial space industry, and that he would choose a physical location "very shortly." As of this writing, no site has been announced.
Here is the part that rarely makes it into the headline: a sitting president cannot create a full federal service academy by decree. That takes an act of Congress. What Friday's order actually authorizes is a study process. Per Air & Space Forces Association, the commission has until roughly late December 2026 to deliver recommendations on the academy's structure, funding model, admissions and citizenship requirements, whether graduates would owe military service, and a process for picking a location. Only after the president signs off on those recommendations, and Congress passes whatever legislation is needed, would NASA and its partner agencies begin actually building anything.
This isn't the first time a Trump-era space announcement has needed Congress to catch up with the applause line. The Space Force itself, now the newest branch of the U.S. military, was proposed with fanfare in 2018 and still took roughly a year of legislative negotiation and budget wrangling before it was formally established in December 2019 — and it drew real pushback along the way, including from senior Air Force leadership who worried about splitting up existing missions. History suggests the space academy is likely to follow a similarly slow, contested path from press conference to reality.
The Nuclear Engine NASA Says Will Fly by 2028
Most rockets today burn chemical propellant, essentially a controlled explosion, and that limits how much thrust a spacecraft can sustain over the many months it takes to cross interplanetary distances. Nuclear thermal propulsion works differently: a small fission reactor, splitting uranium atoms rather than burning fuel, superheats liquid hydrogen propellant and blasts it out through a nozzle to generate thrust.
According to DARPA, this approach can deliver two to five times the propellant efficiency of a conventional chemical rocket, letting a spacecraft carry far less propellant mass to do the same job. That's likely close to what Trump meant when, per Fox News, he said the new ship would have "essentially unlimited fuel," even though it still needs to carry hydrogen to heat and expel. What becomes nearly limitless is the reactor's energy output, not the propellant tank itself — a distinction worth keeping in mind before picturing a spacecraft that never needs refueling at all.
The idea is not new. NASA and the old Atomic Energy Commission tested nuclear rocket engines on the ground in Nevada from the 1950s through the early 1970s under Project Rover and its successor, NERVA. By most technical accounts those engines actually worked, but the program was cancelled before any of them ever flew, a casualty of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty and shifting Cold War-era budget priorities, as The Register has reported.
The modern revival is called DRACO, short for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, a joint NASA-DARPA program with Lockheed Martin building the test vehicle. That project was already targeting an in-orbit demonstration as soon as 2027, before this executive order was ever signed. That test flight, not a crewed landing, is the immediate technical milestone that matters most right now. The 2028 date Trump mentioned refers to an uncrewed interplanetary spacecraft launch toward Mars, not astronauts touching down on the planet.
Applause, Alarm, and an Awkward Budget History
Reactions split fast along predictable lines. Isaacman, NASA's administrator, said the new push would "inspire the next generation to carry the fire of exploration even further," according to The Express Tribune. Kratsios described the planned academy on social media as designed to prepare, in his words, "astronauts, scientists, engineers, operators, entrepreneurs, civil servants, and warfighters" for the space domain, per Newsweek. Elon Musk, who has long pushed for a crewed Mars program through SpaceX, publicly celebrated the announcement and joked about alternative names for the academy, according to BizPacReview.
Not everyone was convinced. Todd Harrison, a space and defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute, called the order "out of left field" and warned it risks blurring what he described as the otherwise well-defined lanes separating NASA, the Space Force, and the U.S. intelligence community's own space programs, according to Defense One. He also questioned why the federal goverment needs to build an entirely new academy from scratch when elite university programs at places like Caltech and MIT already train top aerospace talent every year.
There's a data point that sharpens that skepticism. According to SpaceNews, the Trump administration proposed budgets in both its first and second terms that would have eliminated funding for NASA's existing education arm, the Office of STEM Engagement. Congress rejected those cuts both times and kept the programs running. So the same administration that just proposed building a brand-new federal academy has twice tried to defund the space agency's existing education office — a contrast worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly, since it says as much about the ordinary friction between the White House and Congress over budgets as it does about this specific plan.
None of this means the academy or the nuclear engine won't happen. It means both ideas now enter the same slow machinery every big federal project runs through: commitee hearings, appropriations fights, and, in the academy's case, an actual vote in Congress before a single brick gets laid.
What Actually Happens Next
Two concrete signposts are worth watching over the coming months, and they matter more than any press conference. First, whether the commission's report, due by late December 2026, survives contact with Congress and turns into real appropriated funding rather than another study that quietly expires. Second, whether the DRACO nuclear thermal engine actually reaches orbit and fires successfully as soon as 2027, since that flight test, not the 2028 headline, is the real technical proving ground underneath the Mars mission talk.
It's also worth remembering what a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft would actually buy NASA if it works: shorter transit times to Mars, which means less time astronauts spend exposed to deep-space radiation and fewer supplies that need to be carried along for the ride. That's a genuine engineering prize, independent of who signs the paperwork announcing it.
Key takeaway: An executive order can announce a vision in a single afternoon; building a nuclear engine or a federal academy still runs on the slower clock of engineering tests and congressional votes.
For now, the four Artemis II astronauts who stood behind the president in Houston remain the closest thing the country has actually flown toward deep space. The rest, for the moment, is still on paper.
Referensi & Resources:
- NASA — President Trump Signs Executive Order to Create US Space Academy
- Fox News — Trump signs executive order establishing US Space Academy
- The Express Tribune — Trump signs order to create a US Space Academy
- SpaceNews — President Trump proposes creation of a national space academy
- Defense One — Here's what Trump's new 'Space Academy' could mean for the US military
- Air & Space Forces Association — What to Watch from Trump's US Space Academy Commission
- Newsweek — Trump's new US Space Academy, NASA, and Mars
- DARPA — Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO)
- The Register — NASA, DARPA enlist Lockheed to build nuclear-powered spacecraft