Planet Ships Pelican-11 to Launch Site

A photo of Pelican-11 taken on May 29th in the lab at Planet's San Francisco headquarters

Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about change on Earth, today announced that Pelican-11, the tech demonstration satellite of the second generation (Gen 2) of its high-resolution Pelican™ fleet, has shipped to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California ahead of its launch aboard the upcoming Transporter-17 rideshare mission with SpaceX.

Planet’s first generation (Gen 1) Pelicans are designed to capture 50 cm class resolution imagery. Pelican-11 will join the existing Pelican fleet, and serve as a means of testing new technologies before their integration onboard Planet’s second generation (Gen 2) Pelicans, which are designed to provide up to 30 cm class imagery. Pelican-11 is not anticipated to produce commercially available data; instead, it will collect information to inform Planet’s future Pelican designs and act as a testbed for new Gen 2 technologies and concepts of operation.

Planet plans to launch additional Pelican spacecraft in 2026 and 2027 to continue to meet the rising, global customer demand for sovereign satellite ownership and Planet’s high-resolution data products.