Planet Labs' Latest Pelican Satellite Heads to SpaceX Launch

Planet Labs’ Latest Pelican Satellite Heads to SpaceX Launch. Planet Labs PBC (PL) shares are trading higher on Friday. The company disclosed that Pelican-12, an updated second-generation (Gen 2) high-resolution Pelican satellite, has arrived at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida ahead of its launch on SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission.

Pelican-12 incorporates lessons from Pelican-11, launched in July, and includes payload and communications upgrades delivered less than three months later. It will help Planet test technologies including commercial data relay services, intersatellite communications through a steerable antenna and two-way data rates above the 1 Mbps achieved in a 2025 demonstration. Gen 2 Pelicans are designed for up to 30 cm-class imagery versus 50 cm-class imagery for Gen 1, supporting applications such as agricultural monitoring, critical infrastructure management and disaster response. Pelican-12 will be Planet’s fifth Pelican launch in 2026. The company is expanding production at its Berlin facility and plans additional Pelican launches in 2027 to meet demand for high-resolution data products and Satellite Services.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says Project Suncatcher will test TPUs in space aboard a SpaceX mission to evaluate AI chips in orbit.

From a longer-term trend view, the stock is still in a repair phase: it’s trading 12.4% below its 50-day SMA ($20.41) and more than 34% below both the 100-day and 200-day SMAs, with a Death Cross (50-day below 200-day) that formed in August still hanging over the chart. The near-term improvement is that price is back above the 20-day SMA ($17.56), which can be an early sign that selling pressure is easing. Momentum looks more "range-bound than trending" right now, with RSI at 45.87 (neutral), meaning the stock isn’t stretched enough to scream overbought/oversold and may be waiting for a clearer catalyst. In that context, traders often watch whether RSI can push and hold above the 50 area to confirm improving demand rather than just a bounce. Key levels are fairly clean given the moving-average stack overhead and the recent base-building near the lows: Key Resistance : $21 — Round-number area that also sits near the 50-day zone where rebounds can stall. Key Support : $15.50 — Nearby floor area where buyers previously stepped in, closer to the stock’s recent lower range

Planet Labs is outperforming its Industrials peer group today, up about 0.23 percentage points versus the sector’s +1.27% move. That relative strength matters because Industrials is currently the top-ranked sector (No. 1 of 11), so the stock is leading within the day’s strongest pocket of the market. Zooming out, the sector trend has been choppy: Industrials is down 5.19% over the past 30 days and down 6.45% over the past 90 days. In other words, today’s strength is a tailwind, but the intermediate backdrop still argues for respecting overhead resistance levels until the sector’s longer-term trend improves.

Looking further out, the next major catalyst for the stock arrives with the Dec. 9 (estimated) earnings report. Revenue Estimate : $114.33 million (Up from $81.25 million year-over-year)