Intel ops are underway at Space Command’s nascent Alabama HQ

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Less than a year after President Trump reversed a Biden-era decision to keep U.S. Space Command in Colorado, space intelligence operations are being conducted in existing offices at Redstone Arsenal while a permanent headquarters is built on base.

By year’s end, SPACECOM plans to have roughly 200 of the 1,800 Colorado-based positions at the Army base. Roughly 50 of those employees are already conducting missions with the command’s Joint Intelligence Support element, or JISE, which is already doing analysis for space operations and coordinating with allies. Those analysts are also coordinating with colleagues working, at least for the next few years, at Space Command’s existing headquarters in Colorado.

“We've designed our facilities with collaboration spaces and with the collaboration tools that allow our personnel here in Huntsville—of course, those numbers are growing—to work back with our people in Colorado Springs to execute our missions,” Whiting told reporters on Wednesday. “So far, our folks are crushing that, and I'm very proud of how they're performing.”

Reporters toured the up-and-coming facilities and saw the progress of the new headquarters on Wednesday during the Space and Missile Defense Symposium here. While the personnel moves and construction projects will not be complete until 2032, military officials said that the combatant command remains focused on its mission. 

In April, Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Command’s leader, hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Joint Intelligence Support element on base. Wednesday’s tour was among the first access allowed to media outlets.

“Make no mistake, the JISE leading this charge serves as a symbol of our commitment to ensuring mission needs are executed flawlessly throughout this move,” Brig. Gen. Nathan Rusin, who leads the USSPACECOM Intelligence Directorate, said in an April press release. 

In 2021, in the last weeks of his first term, Trump announced that Space Command would move its headquarters from Petersen Space Force Base in Colorado to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Several congressional probes followed. In July 2023, President Biden reversed the decision and said it would stay in Colorado.

An April 2025 Defense Department Inspector General’s probe wondered why the 2023 basing decision was made by the White House instead of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. The service secretary told lawmakers in 2023 he thought “the projected cost savings, together with the availability of potential mitigation measures, outweighed the operational risks that had been identified” for moving the command to Alabama.

But a May 2025 Government Accountability Office probe showed that if SPACECOM headquarters were to remain in Colorado that “new military construction would be needed to support the headquarters’ operations” and that officials “faced ongoing personnel, facilities, and communications challenges” in setting up a permanent facility out West.

Whiting told reporters that the goal is to have half of SPACECOM at Redstone Arsenal by 2028 with a full move-in completed by 2032. The command’s joint operations center, the main command-and-control hub for space warfare missions, will remain in Colorado until the completion of the new headquarters. 

“The opportunity for U.S. Space Command is that we get a purpose-built command and control headquarters out of this, we did not have that in Colorado,” Whiting said. “So to get this facility is going to be an incredible accelerant to our mission.”