NASA’s lease for its headquarters building expires in 2028, and the agency is searching for a new space to house its workforce. As the agency explores options in Washington or the surrounding area, a group of Texas lawmakers has taken the opportunity to request that NASA headquarters be moved to Houston, Texas, to “reinvigorate our national space agency.”
In a letter addressed to Donald Trump, the U.S. senators urged the president to relocate NASA’s headquarters from Washington D.C. to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston when the current lease expires. The group of 29 Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz, argue that “as NASA’s leadership has languished in our nation’s capital, the core missions of this critical agency are more divided than ever before,” the letter reads. “This seismic disconnect between NASA’s headquarters and its missions has opened the door to bureaucratic micromanagement and an erosion of centers’ interdependence.”
The senators claim that NASA’s headquarters in Washington D.C. is disconnected from the rest of NASA’s centers across the country, and therefore the agency’s decision-making process is “funneled up to bureaucrats at headquarters rather than empowering scientists and astronauts across the centers,” according to the letter.
The letter goes on to describe Houston as “space city,” and that it is home to several commercial space ventures. “For the United States to reach the surface of Mars, NASA must rely on a robust commercial space sector,” the senators wrote. “Towards that end, no state offers greater economic and geographic benefits than Texas.”
Lawmakers in Texas are trying hard to reclaim the state’s significance in spaceflight history, which, to be fair, isn’t really in contention. Just last week, U.S. senators John Cornyn and Cruz introduced a bill, the Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act, which would require the Space Shuttle Discovery to be transferred from the Smithsonian to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Although it is virtually impossible to move the Shuttle, the senators argue that it is for the “unique relationship between the entire program and its support staff in Houston.”
It’s true that plenty of space action takes place in Houston, home to the historic facility that monitored the Apollo missions to the Moon, but NASA is a government agency. As with most other federal agencies, NASA’s headquarters is in Washington D.C. to stay close to the government.
NASA is already bracing for an upcoming budget nightmare for the year 2026, which has been described as an extinction-level event for the space agency. The agency has also started implementing its reduction in force (RIF) approach, closing three offices and laying off staff in compliance with executive orders by the new administration that target the federal workforce. NASA is just one of several federal agencies facing the brunt of the administration’s slew of executive orders and funding decisions, which could severely disrupt the work being done on exploring the cosmos and understanding our place in it.
