Planet officially opened its new Berlin manufacturing facility on Tuesday, marking facility handover and cleanroom fit-out. The 5,700-square-meter facility, announced last year to double Pelican satellite production capacity, is expected to begin production this fall.
It’s a key part of Planet’s expansion in Germany, which has been the company’s base in Europe for 10 years. Planet aims to meet growing demand from the European market and hire 70 new employees in addition to the company’s 150 employees in Berlin already.
“When you couple [Planet] being there for a decade [with] the largest economy in Europe, needing to re-industrialize the space ecosystem, the tech talent there is phenomena in optics, signals processing, and Earth Observation — that it was the natural step for us to just expand that office and add a factory,” Planet co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Robbie Schingler told Via Satellite last week during World Space Business Week.
Ahead of the factory opening, Planet recently signed a deal to launch the first Pelican satellite built in Germany with Isar Aerospace on a German-built rocket. The launch itself will take place from the Andøya Space complex in Norway. Isar Aerospace just had success with its second launch, another piece of momentum for Germany’s space industry. The Planet/Isar launch is expected in early 2027.
Planet has longstanding German customers and partners including the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG). Schingler noted that Planet looks to support Spock-2, a Bundeswehr planned multi-sensor imaging and sensing satellite constellation.
“We hope to be central to the coalition to support Germany to have their own eyes, and to be able to also serve other European customers that want much more of a European space ecosystem, so that they could they could choose to purchase satellites from our German factory,” Schingler added.
