SpaceX will land a rocket in the Bahamas for the second time today (February 19) and you can watch the action live.
A rocket topped with 29 from SpaceX Star Link Broadband satellites are scheduled to launch from Florida. Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today, during a four-hour window that opens at 5 pm EST (2200 GMT).
If all goes as planned today, the first stage of the Falcon 9 will return to Land just over eight minutes after launch. It will land on the SpaceX The “Just Read the Instructions” drone, which will be stationed in Exuma Sound in the Bahamas.
It will be only SpaceX’s second landing in Bahamian waters. The first occurred in February 2025also during a Starlink launch.
Most Falcon 9 boosters launching from the Space Coast land further north, in the open waters of the Atlantic. But landing near The Bahamas offers advantages.
“Our new landing collaboration with The Bahamas will allow Falcon 9 to launch into new orbital trajectories,” SpaceX wrote via X in February 2025.
However, less than a month later, the upper stage of the SpaceX project starship A mega rocket disintegrated over the Caribbean during a test flight. Debris rains down on the Bahamas. the nation put the partnership with SpaceX on hold in April 2025, saying it wanted to conduct an environmental assessment of all rocket landings in the region.
Previous Booster 1077 Releases
That work is now complete. On Tuesday (February 17), the Bahamas Civil Aviation Authority announced that it has clear SpaceX to launch rockets into Exuma Sound once again.
Today’s landing will be the 26th for this particular first stage of the Falcon 9, which carries the designation 1077. Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will deploy the 29 Starlink satellites in low earth orbit about 64 minutes after takeoff.
The spacecraft will join nearly 9,700 other satellites in the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest extraterrestrial network ever assembled.
