The hunt is on for a state to host the U.S. Space Academy.

NASA released a request for information on Sept. 9, following a meeting that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman held in Washington for the occasion. The space agency has set a quick timeline for the project: States are encouraged to submit a proposal by Oct. 26, 2026.

"Now, with the RFI underway, states across the country have an opportunity to help us shape a legacy institution built for America's future in space," Isaacman said in a NASA statement on Sept. 10.

The U.S. Space Academy won't be a purely military institution in the mold of the Naval Academy or West Point. It will be led by NASA, and one of its core functions will be educating future scientists, engineers and astronauts, as well as warfighters.

If all goes to plan, the academy will welcome its first class of 300 students for instruction starting in 2028. Because that doesn't leave much time for planning and building, the RFI states that the academy may start before it has a permanent campus.

While the academy may rely on "one or more partner institutions" for facilities to start out, the RFI outlines plans for a big campus once everything is up and running.

A permanent campus will include buildings for teaching, research, administration, student residences, sports venues and gyms, dining halls and related facilities.

The purpose of the new space academy is to "encourage and guide the next generation of Americans to pursue cutting-edge, technical fields that currently do not have a sufficient amount of programs and graduates needed to ensure America maintains superiority in space," a White House fact sheet about the planned academy states.

The request calls for a groundbreaking by 2027, as well as a temporary campus for the first class of 300 students in 2028. The timeline in the RFI has the academy's permanent location in operation by 2031.

"The location of the U.S. Space Academy is foundational to its success," NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson said in the Sept. 10 statement.

"We're asking states to bring their strongest vision — the infrastructure, the partnerships and the community that can compete with the elite options this caliber of student will have and match the boundless ambition of our future space leaders," he added.

We've been studying the moon for a long time. NASA has gathered mountains of data over decades of lunar missions and studies. The data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) alone, for example, exceeds that of all NASA's other planetary missions combined.

Analyzing all this information takes lots of time and effort from researchers. So, NASA and IBM have developed an AI model to help sift through the moon data — an advance the agency announced on Thursday (Sept. 10). The open-source model, called the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, is currently available for free at Hugging Face.

"NASA has spent decades building an extraordinary scientific record of the moon, but collecting data is only part of the job," NASA's Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and acting chief data and AI officer, said in the announcement.

The new AI model can help researchers with tasks like mapping craters, finding young volcanic features, and modeling possible locations of water ice near the lunar poles, according to NASA.

In the announcement, Murphy said that NASA needs to make scientific data easier to explore and use. To this end, NASA has been developing and releasing science-focused AI models with IBM. Previous models include one focused on Earth observation and another for heliophysics.

This is part of a larger trend of AI use in planetary science. Space agencies and private space companies around the world have been looking into how AI models can help with analysis to increase scientific productivity, reduce costs and streamline workflows.

"The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model shows what's possible when we bring AI to NASA's petabytes of scientific data," Murphy said in the announcement. "That's a real opportunity we see with AI: turning large-scale data into new discoveries."

The AI model was mostly trained on data from the LRO mission. Over 17 years, NASA's lunar orbiter has compiled a nearly complete mosaic of images that detail the moon's surface in high definition.