Watch SpaceX land a rocket in The Bahamas for the 2nd time ever today

a black and white rocket launches into a blue sky with a lake in the foreground — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 29 Starlink satellites from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Jan. 9, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX will land a rocket in The Bahamas for the second time ever today (Feb. 19), and you can watch the action live.

A rocket topped with 29 of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites is scheduled to launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today, during a four-hour window that opens at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT).

A black and white SpaceX rocket stands on a landing drone ship off the coast of the Bahamas on Feb. 18, 2025. — A Falcon 9 first stage rests on the deck of a SpaceX drone ship in Exuma Sound after making the company's first-ever Bahamas landing on Feb. 18, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)

If all goes according to plan today, the Falcon 9's first stage will return to Earth a little over eight minutes after launch. It will touch down on the SpaceX droneship "Just Read the Instructions," which will be stationed in The Bahamas' Exuma Sound.

It will be just the second SpaceX landing in Bahamian waters. The first occurred in February 2025, also during a Starlink launch.

Most Falcon 9 boosters that launch from the Space Coast touch down farther north, in the open waters of the Atlantic. But landing near The Bahamas offers advantages.

"Our new landing collaboration with The Bahamas will enable Falcon 9 to launch to new orbital trajectories," SpaceX wrote via X in February 2025.

Less than a month later, however, the upper stage of SpaceX's Starship megarocket broke apart over the Caribbean during a test flight, raining debris down on The Bahamas. The nation put the SpaceX partnership on hold in April 2025, saying it wanted to perform an environmental assessment of all rocket landings in the region.

Previous Booster 1077 launches

That work is now complete. On Tuesday (Feb. 17), the Civil Aviation Authority of The Bahamas announced that it has cleared SpaceX to land rockets in Exuma Sound once again.

Today's touchdown will be the 26th for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, which carries the designation 1077. The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, will deploy the 29 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit about 64 minutes after liftoff.

The spacecraft will join nearly 9,700 other satellites in the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest off-Earth network ever assembled.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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