The site selection committee for Space Command will assess Colorado Springs this week in their mission to choose one of five finalist cities to serve as the permanent host of the combatant command, already based in the Springs.

We hope committee members get the full appreciation for the role Colorado Springs serves as the county’s best military town, bar none. Keeping Space Command in the Springs will benefit all of Colorado with more than 1,400 high-skilled, high-wage jobs and a command that will bolster the state’s soaring aerospace culture and industry.

Regardless of other factors that make Colorado Springs the clear favorite, the community should walk away with the highest-ranking evaluation criteria category, called “mission-related,” which is: “available qualified workforce”; the city’s “proximity to mutually supporting space entities”; and the area’s capacity “to provide emergency incident response requirements, and enable mobility.”

Those considerations account for 40 points toward the decision. The remaining 60 points are divided among “infrastructure capacity (30 points),” “community support (15 points),” and “costs to the Department of the Air Force (15 points).”

Consider the “mission-related” and other criteria:

• Metro Colorado Springs is home to more than 250 aerospace and defense companies that attract and retain some of the world’s most qualified and dedicated space engineers and scientists. As of 2018, Colorado’s aerospace economy was second only to California’s with the highest concentration of private aerospace employment in the country. The Front Range is earning the nickname Aerospace Alley.

• The Colorado Springs region offers more relevant and mutually supportive space entities than the other finalists combined. The United States Air Force Academy provides the platinum standard in higher education geared toward the needs of Space Command. Housed in the same community, Space Command can work directly with the Academy to prepare the talent needed for this critical command.

• Other mutually supportive entities include NORTHCOM; NORAD; Schriever Air Force Base; Catalyst Campus; AFWerx; the international Space Foundation; dozens of universities and colleges throughout the state that offer a vast array of STEM programs; a local public school system with traditional attendance centers and charters to meet the diverse, individual needs of children; and more.

• Our community has consistently invested in public safety to provide the highest level of emergency incident response services.

• Taxpayers have consistently agreed to fund improvements and capacity enhancements to transportation infrastructure, including adding new lanes to I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver and improving access to military bases.

• By supporting health, families, and military personnel, Colorado Springs ranks as the country’s most desired destination for millennials and has stood out among all demographics as the most desirable city in which to live.

• Space Command already has direct access to billions in assets in Colorado Springs, meaning a move would waste money and disrupt our ability to quickly gain an advantage in space-based national defense over China and other hostile adversaries.

Colorado Springs has never treated military personnel as visitors passing through. The military community and Colorado Springs are one. That is why more than 80,000 veterans choose to live here in retirement. It is the reason active military personnel request assignments to bases in Colorado Springs more than anywhere else.

Sadly, not all other competing communities can promise the same level of reliable support for our military operations. When Pentagon officials tried to secure the privacy and security of personnel infected with COVID-19 last spring, progressive San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg complained and demanded the military share sensitive information with the public.

San Antonio officials frequently clash with military officials. Mayor Nirenberg blasted Pentagon officials in March for quarantining COVID-19 patients at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland — just as they quarantined patients at Fort Carson in the Springs. While San Antonio said not-in-our-backyard, Springs officials humbly accepted their role as a military host and all that goes with it.

When the Pentagon asked San Antonio for ambulances to transport COVID patients, Assistant City Manager Colleen Bridger balked.

“Don’t we get to say no? What happens if we say no?” Bridger said, as quoted in the San Antonio Current. So much for the need “to provide emergency incident response requirements, and enable mobility” — part of the 40-point “mission-related” criteria.

With any finalist city other than Colorado Springs, the government would take a costly and disruptive gamble with Space Command — a combatant mission we cannot put at risk. Colorado Springs has proven for generations its ability to host and support sophisticated military aerospace operations without reservation or complaint. This is what we do. This is who we are. For the sake of our country’s national defense, keep Space Command in Colorado Springs.