S.A. to make pitch for Space Command
Pentagon team is weighing move to one of six cities
Local leaders will huddle Monday with a Pentagon site selection team that within weeks is expected to recommend either San Antonio or one of five other cities as the new home of U.S. Space Command.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg said he’ll be joined in the virtual meeting by City Manager Erik Walsh, Jenna Saucedo-Herrera, president/CEO of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, and retired Marine Maj. Gen. Juan Ayala, director of the city’s Office of Military & Veteran Affairs.
The Pentagon team already has visited San Antonio as well as its chief rival in the contest, Colorado Springs, Colo., where retired generals and others have waged a public campaign to keep the headquarters.
A decision naming one of the six finalists is expected early in the new year.
Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs is the provisional headquarters for Space Command and is thought by some familiar with the competition to have the inside track, but Nirenberg dismissed that idea.
“It’s certainly true the command is presently in Colorado and that the (Air Force) Academy is in Colorado. But look, the future of cyberspace in the military is right here in San Antonio,” the mayor said.
“The center of military medicine is here in San Antonio,” he continued. “The birthplace of human beings in flight and in space is here in San Antonio. Military City, U.S.A., and all of the intangibles that belong to a community that embraces our national defense apparatus is here in San Antonio.”
Other locations on the short list of possible headquarters sites are Patrick AFB near Cocoa Beach, Fla.; Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, N.M.; Offutt AFB in Omaha, Neb.; and Redstone Army Airfield in Huntsville, Ala.
Space Command was established as the 11th combat command in August 2019 and currently has about 1,400 military and civilian personnel. It operates just like the Central Command, a unified command with forces from the various military branches that oversaw wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The difference is that its domain is space.
Nirenberg said the Pentagon’s in-person visit occurred last Saturday at Port San Antonio, the former Kelly AFB. The mayor described it as “more of a technical
interview and site visit,” with the second round on Monday to involve the principals of each site.
“It's going to be a discussion and further in-depth, detailed conversation about the different aspects of our proposal and strengths of what San Antonio brings to the table,” Nirenberg said. “They have a very rigid schedule they're adhering to.”
Nirenberg, Ayala and Saucedo-Herrera traveled to Washington on Oct. 22 to meet with the Air Force's chief of staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., as well as Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, U.S. Space Force's chief of space operations, and the head of the Defense Health Agency, Lt. Gen. Ronald J. Place and other officials.
Raymond commands both Space Force and Space Command at the moment, and reports to the defense secretary.
Space Command is separate from U.S. Space Force, also established last year as a new branch of the military. Space Force will organize, train and equip troops the Pentagon calls “space professionals,” and is headquartered at the Pentagon with the other major military branches.
San Antonio is home to the largest joint base in the United States with three major military installations that include Air Force basic training, joint medic instruction and the 16th Air Force, a key cyberdefense asset.
Its major commands include the Air Education and Training Command at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, and Army North, Army South, and the Army's Installation Management Command, all at JBSA-Fort Sam Houston.
City leaders had touted several sites here for Space Command, among them JBSA-Lackland and the former Brooks AFB, now a commercial development, before the Pentagon put the Port on its short list. The National Security Agency also has a large facility here.
Jim Perschbach, CEO of Port San Antonio, said there's a perception that Colorado Springs already has a facility to house Space Command, but he said none of the buildings were meant for the mission it now will do.
San Antonio's advantage is the city's ability to provide a facility at “commercial speed and commercial prices,” rather than relying on military construction funding approved by Congress, he said.
“We are a political subdivision of the state. We are not a federal installation, so we don't have to do (military construction) and for comparison, look at the (U.S. Strategic Command) headquarters up at (Offutt AFB) that took about 12 years to deliver,” Perschbach said. “We are very, very confident that we can provide real savings on both time and cost.”
Space Command should be in a “forward-looking” culture that provides for an innovative and transformative economy, and San Antonio has “tremendous critical infrastructure assets,” he said, with work now being done on its electric grid that would give the military “the ability to protect their networks — this is going to be vitally needed.”
Nirenberg consistently has stressed San Antonio's historic role in the manned space program, which included President John F. Kennedy's famous “Cap Over the Wall” speech at Brooks the day before his assassination, as a reason why it has a good shot at the command.
“The future of the military is here in San Antonio,” Nirenberg said. “This in no way takes away from the Colorado Springs region, but the fact of the matter is San Antonio represents the future of our country as it represents the future of our national defense.”