HOUSTON, Texas — In a ceremony befitting the new era of American space dominance, President Donald Trump presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission and, in a move that space policy analysts are calling “transformational,” signed an executive order creating the United States Space Academy.

The four honorees — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch of NASA, along with Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — flew a ten-day journey around the Moon earlier this year, setting a new distance record for humanity, as reported by NASA. As the president pinned the nation’s highest space honor on each, he told the crew that he himself “could have been an astronaut,” a sentiment the astronauts received with the warm, unbroken silence of people who have just flown around the Moon and are now very much on the ground.

The Space Academy, as proposed, would sit under NASA and, in the words of the White House, “educate the engineers, scientists, technicians, operators and even the astronauts” of a future the administration describes as “inspiring,” according to NASA’s announcement of the order. It is, officials were careful to note, not a service academy — not in the mold of the Air Force Academy — a detail Ars Technica points out is precisely what has left defense scholars quietly reaching for their coffee.

"It's going to be beautiful," the president told the room.

The academy’s leadership is already in place, in the sense that it has a chair, an executive director, and two vice chairs. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will head the new Presidential Commission; Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson will serve as its executive director. The vice chairs are the assistant to the president for science and technology, Michael Kratsios, and the assistant to the president for economic policy, Kevin Hassett. A commission, in other words, has been appointed to design a school, to be funded by an agency, that is in the middle of a budget reduction, in order to train the people who will staff the very agency that must first find the money to build it.

U.S. SPACE ACADEMY: COURSE CATALOG (PRELIMINARY)

  • Core Curriculum: To be determined
  • Admissions: Awaiting a school
  • Campus: In the planning phase
  • Accreditation: Not yet invented
  • Tuition: "It's going to be beautiful"

Space policy veterans say the real story is the timing. NASA faces budget cuts even as it attempts to return astronauts to the lunar surface before the end of the president’s second term. A new academy, in this reading, is less a school than a declaration — a monument to the future, erected before the present has been funded.

The astronauts, for their part, have been characteristically gracious. Christina Koch, who has logged more time in space than any American woman, was photographed beaming as the medal went on, as NBC News documented in its crew profiles. Jeremy Hansen, the mission’s only non-American, has said he is honored to serve alongside his crew, though he has also, as has been well-documented, spent the past several months fielding questions about whether the Canadian Space Agency is “technically a partner or a guest.”

At press time, the commission had not yet announced a name, a campus, a curriculum, or a start date. It had, however, announced a color scheme.