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This week the rocket program finally got cancelled, and Doctors Hospital is giving folks a break on that ER bill.

Let's get into it.

For the past year and a half, SpaceX has been landing Falcon 9 rocket boosters in Exuma Sound. If that's news to you, you're not alone.

The program was pitched as a space tourism win for The Bahamas, with up to 20 booster landings planned in Bahamian waters. In reality, only two ever happened (one in February 2025, another in February 2026) before SpaceX shut the whole thing down. This week, environmental advocates said good riddance, and also, how did this get approved in the first place?

Why now?

Joseph Darville of Save The Bays and Waterkeepers Bahamas didn't hold back, calling the program something "we should never, ever, have entertained." His argument is simple. The Bahamas is mostly ocean and very little land, so exposing that marine environment to an unproven, unguaranteed-safe activity was never a risk worth taking for a few splashy headlines about space tourism, a benefit he says never actually materialized.

He went further, arguing that with climate change and sea level rise already putting pressure on the country's coastlines, this was exactly the wrong moment to be adding new, avoidable risks into the mix. His view: the country got nothing meaningful in return for the exposure it took on.

Dr. Ancilleno Davis of Science and Perspective is less focused on the rocket and more focused on the paperwork trail behind it. He says the approval process took about 11 months before the public knew anything about it, and residents got less than two weeks' notice before the first landing shut down their access to a large stretch of water. That's the kind of timeline that leaves people finding out about a major development in their own backyard well after the ink is already dry.

He also flagged that SpaceX's own environmental assessment claimed no one was doing marine mammal research in Bahamian waters, which he says is flatly untrue, and pointed out that his own organization has more environmental assessments and management plans publicly available than the Department of Environmental Planning and Protection does on its own website.

The reason this made the news wasn’t because of the rockets… it's a story about a foreign company getting the green light to operate in Bahamian sovereign waters with almost no public visibility into how or why.

The bottom line: SpaceX has ended the program on its own, so there's no policy fight left to have there. But Dr. Davis is now pushing for something bigger: a proper environmental baseline for Bahamian waters and public access to the full record of environmental assessments, not just the handful currently sitting on DEPP's website. Darville wants something even more permanent, an official position that this kind of booster landing never happens here again.

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Let’s give the math a break. This week, history

Solve this dead easy BGCSE question:

What was Nassau originally called before it was renamed Nassau?

Check the bottom of the newsletter for the answer.

Doctors Hospital just announced it's planning to cut its emergency room deposit requirement by 33 percent.

CEO Dennis Deveaux says the hospital has finally gotten its bad debt under control. Impairment and provision losses (basically, bills that never get paid) dropped 46 percent year over year, from $6.6 million down to $3.6 million, comfortably under the hospital's internal target. That's a big turnaround from two years ago, when those losses topped $13 million and were, in Deveaux's own words, an "existential risk." With that problem shrinking, he says the hospital wants to pass some of the savings back to patients instead of just banking it. His quote says it plainly: "$3,000 is a big number for many people."

The hospital's outstanding unpaid bills are still climbing, up nearly 14 percent to $45.5 million, and government alone owes Doctors Hospital just under $10 million, an amount that grew by almost a third this year. So the hospital is cutting fees for everyday patients at the same time one of its biggest debtors, the government, keeps letting its own tab grow.

Doctors Hospital posted an $11.5 million profit for the year, though most of that came from a one-time gain on selling its Harbourside property to the government. Strip that out and it's still a real $4 million turnaround from last year's loss. A cheaper ER visit is good news regardless. Whether the discount survives once the current cost savings get absorbed elsewhere is the part worth watching.

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💸 Someone's asking where that billion dollars went. Fidelity Bank exec Gowon Bowe flagged that the 2025-2026 budget shows national debt jumped by $1 billion, but the deficit only grew by $121.2 million. He's calling on government to explain the gap before everyone just shrugs and moves on.

⛏️ Grand Bahama is stuck between jobs and the environment. Bahama Rock says it'll have to halt production by September 18 unless regulators approve an expansion into new land, citing depleted reserves and job losses. Community group Preserving Paradise says over 600 questions about flooding, blasting, and water quality are still sitting unanswered.

⛽ FOCOL is having a very good year. The company posted a 50.1% jump in annual profit, landing at $44.4 million, driven largely by its utility services division. It's also planning to bring liquefied natural gas into New Providence's electricity system by early 2027.

💡 The lights situation is actually improving, slightly. Bahamas Grid Company says it's cut legacy underground cable faults from 50 down to 27, with an international repair crew brought in this month for a two-week push. CEO Dareo McKenzie says the foundational work is done and focus now shifts to the wider distribution system.

🏰 Fort Montagu just got a lifeline. The United States pledged roughly a quarter-million dollars to help preserve the historic fort, which has been steadily losing ground to erosion. A small win for one of Nassau's oldest landmarks.

🍎 Apple's finally jumping into folding phones. New CEO John Ternus unveiled the iPhone Duo, an iPad-sized fold-out device that opens for preorder October 16 starting at $2,000 (up to $3,000 for more storage). Analysts expect Apple to ship 6.5 million of them in its first quarter alone, worth roughly $14 billion in sales.

🏠 US home sales just hit a 15-month low. Existing home sales dropped 2% in August as mortgage rates climbed back above 7% for the first time since last May. Rates have been rising alongside Treasury yields, driven by inflation worries, oil prices, and mounting government debt.

💵 Trump promised every American $5,000 if the GOP sweeps the midterms. The catch: nobody's sure how to pay for the roughly $1.2 trillion price tag, or whether the payout is even legal. Vice President JD Vance says tariff revenue will cover it, but tariffs have only brought in $300 billion since January 2025, and a chunk of that is already earmarked for refunds.

🇩🇪 Germany's far-right AfD just won a state election. The party took a landslide victory in Saxony-Anhalt, putting it in position to potentially form Germany's first far-right state government since the Nazi era. Mainstream parties have historically refused to work with AfD, so it's still unclear if that firewall holds.

📚 Turns out AI homework help might be backfiring. A new OECD report found students who use AI frequently for schoolwork scored significantly worse on science tests than students who rarely use it, the gap equal to about a year and a half of education. Light, occasional use still seemed to help though, so it's not a total loss.

Charles Towne.

It was established in 1695 and later renamed Nassau in honor of William III, formerly Prince of Orange-Nassau

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— The Bay Street Brief Team