Texas lawmakers have launched a bid for their state to become the new site of NASA’s headquarters.
Space News reports the Texas congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump recommending NASA headquarters be relocated from Washington, DC, to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The lease on NASA’s headquarters is slated to expire in 2028 and the agency has been scouting for other locations in the Washington metro area. However, the Texas lawmakers believe the agency would be better served within the Lone Star State.
“For NASA to return to its core mission of excellence in exploration, its headquarters should be located at a place where NASA’s most critical missions are and where transformational leadership from the ground up can be provided,” said the letter signed by the Texas delegation’s 27 members. “We write to urge you to use this opportunity to reinvigorate our national space agency and move NASA’s headquarters from Washington, DC to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas.”
Texas is the latest state seeking to lure NASA’s headquarters out of the nation’s capital. Florida lawmakers introduced a bill last month that would encourage the agency’s relocation to their state, while Ohio officials have proposed relocating the headquarters to the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
But relocating NASA’s headquarters would not necessarily result in the agency’s 2,500-person workforce moving to a new state. Rather, the agency is now considering plans to relocate certain functions from Washington to field centers.
“One of the executive orders requires us to look at our agency organization and all of its components and see if there’s some optimization or some efficiencies that might be gained by either combining or relocating to more cost-efficient areas,” said Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, at a recent symposium. “We’re taking a look at where those functions could be relocated.”
Petro added NASA would never entirely leave Washington, stating, “I would always envision that the office of the administrator would always be in DC, along with some key functions like [legislative] affairs, maybe the general counsel, some communications staff, et cetera. I think that would be beneficial to have that, as a minimum, in DC.”
