Axios Huntsville
October 06, 2026
1 big thing: 🤝 Burying the Space Command hatchet
Colorado Springs and Huntsville are putting their feud over U.S. Space Command behind them to focus on the next big aerospace imperative: Golden Dome.
Why it matters: The partnership is turning two aerospace development rivals into teammates in the game to land work around the $185 billion Golden Dome initiative.
The latest: More than 90 economic development leaders from Colorado Springs are in Huntsville, working with their Rocket City counterparts to see how they can each wield their respective industries and expertise to advance the initiative.
What they're saying: Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade said at an event Monday that Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle "looked me in the eye and said, 'Mayor, don't worry, we're going to take care of your people.'"
- "At that moment we weren't two mayors represented between cities," he said. "We were two Americans entrusted with caring for the people who serve our country."
- Local and visiting economic development officials spoke to a competition that's now turning toward cooperation.
Zoom in: More than 70 aerospace and defense companies maintain operations in both cities, per an announcement, "reflecting the increasingly integrated defense-industrial base supporting U.S. missile defense efforts."
Between the lines: A Colorado lawsuit filed last October that seeks to block the Trump administration from moving Space Command headquarters to Huntsville is still active.
Yes, but: The Colorado Springs Chamber & Economic Development Corp., which is the group visiting Huntsville this week, came out against the lawsuit, filing a brief supporting the administration's motion to dismiss the suit earlier this year.
Driving the news: Golden Dome — and making it happen — is a focus of aerospace higher-ups across the board, though the funding behind it isn't quite a sure thing.
- A continuing resolution funds the federal government through Dec. 11, but the Pentagon's $17.5 billion Golden Dome funding request, which is dependent on reconciliation in Congress, hasn't yet passed.
2. 🌃 "Tremendous potential for collaboration"
The message from economic development officials Monday was simple: Colorado Springs and Huntsville have spent years competing, but going forward, they'll be working together for Golden Dome and other opportunities.
The latest: Battle and Mobolade joined other leaders from their respective communities in Huntsville to talk about how their communities are trading competition for cooperation.
- "We have an opportunity to bring together two communities that understand the space and defense enterprise from different but highly complementary perspectives," Battle said. "There's a tremendous potential for collaboration."
- "There's no reason to pretend that Colorado Springs and the city of Huntsville have not competed fiercely over the last several years," Mobolade said. "We have."
Yes, but: "Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive," he said. "Our cities have helped write important chapters of America's story of space and national defense, and now we have an opportunity to write the next chapter."
What they're saying: "My life's a tale of these two cities," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, told the crowd Monday.
- Whiting graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs and whose great-grandfather who was an educator in Madison County a century ago, highlighted tales of adversaries-turned-allies Monday.
- That includes the story of Wernher von Braun in Huntsville and the 1985 cult movie "Enemy Mine," where a future astronaut is stranded alongside a member of an adversarial alien race, yet the two end up allies.
- He compared Huntsville and Colorado Springs, with their complimentary space and defense ecosystems, to the automobile industries of Pittsburgh and Detroit, and the medical hubs in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
The bottom line: "Both cities rely on the same prime contractors, the same talent pipelines, and increasingly the same programs — including Golden Dome for America," Whiting said.
3. Orbit: 🏆 John Cleese brings Holy Grail to HSV
4. 📈 Boeing Huntsville gets $14.7B PAC-3 boost
Axios Huntsville
