Trump Calls the International Space Station from Johnson Space Center, Aug. 28, 2026
August 28, 2026 · The White House · 0:14:23
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
From Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on August 28, 2026, President Donald Trump spoke by phone with the crew aboard the International Space Station, with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman beside him. “Station, this is Houston. Are you ready for the event?” the call began. The President congratulated the crew — “great Americans, great patriots, brave people” — and told them the news of the day: “we’re going to do a very special academy… whether it’s West Point, Annapolis, the Coast Guard Academy… we’re going to have an academy for what you people do,” at “that very high level.”
The station crew, in the middle of a series of spacewalks with another planned the following week, welcomed the announcement — the first they had heard of it. A Space Force colonel aboard thanked the President “for propelling us in that direction” and described looking at the station from the robotic arm during the previous week’s spacewalk. The President closed by inviting the crew to the Oval Office when they return: “We’ll see you when you get back… Be safe. God bless you.”
Why it matters
The call is the human counterpart to the day’s policy announcement at Johnson Space Center (see the Space Medal of Honor page for the same visit): the U.S. Space Academy, proposed at service-academy level, was announced to the serving crew in orbit before it was announced anywhere else. The academy is an education commitment this chronicle will track from executive order to first class.
Sources: The White House, “President Trump Calls the International Space Station,” August 28, 2026, Houston, TX (official upload, embedded above; the upload’s description places the call in Houston). Remarks as delivered on the call.
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