Eutelsat and OroraTech Partner to Deploy Up to 96 Thermal Payloads

Planet Labs launched 20 satellites on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare from Vandenberg, sending up a stack that included a prototype for Google's Project Suncatcher, Tanager-2, and 18 SuperDoves, according to a company press release. Planet Labs established contact and began commissioning Tanager-2, the Suncatcher prototype, and two SuperDoves. Google is using the Planet-hosted demo to run four TPUs with the Gemma AI model in orbit, a step toward space-based AI compute. Shares of the earth imaging satellite company jumped 7.8% in the afternoon session on the news. Planet Labs is down 14.5% since the beginning of the year, and at $17.44 per share it is trading 66.1% below its 52-week high of $51.40 from May 2026.

The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, or DE, is testing the feasibility, or POC, of technology from the company Tomorrow.io, which uses low Earth orbit, or LEO, satellites equipped with Microwave Sounder instruments to measure water mass in the atmosphere, with AI helping to process the data so that updates can be issued more frequently than once per hour, approaching real-time reporting. Mr. Chaichanok Chidchob, Minister of Digital Economy and Society, said that after the POC period ends, the ministry is still studying and comparing technologies and the cost-effectiveness of the project, since it takes the form of annual service fees rather than an outright purchase, and the ministry is open to other companies with similar technology coming forward to propose solutions, for transparency and to prevent accusations of locking in specifications. The project will be carried out within the agency's annual budget framework and does not need to be submitted to the Cabinet for approval. At the same time, the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society is also adjusting its disaster warning criteria, from previously waiting for confidence of more than 90% to issuing warnings once the system assesses a risk of about 60-70%, and it is cooperating with the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation to push forward the One Map project and to push for data from the Meteorological Department to become open data, as well as designating the spokesperson of the Prime Minister's Office as the main person to make announcements during crises.

Rocket Lab completed two back-to-back Electron launches for Synspective in September 2026, extending the customer's synthetic aperture radar constellation. The missions added further satellites to Synspective's commercial Earth observation fleet and continued Rocket Lab's high launch cadence as a dedicated small launch provider for constellation customers. The company has now launched 13 StriX satellites with 100% mission success, a record it uses to argue for a larger share of small lift demand from commercial and government buyers. Investors are watching how many of the 14 remaining StriX launches Rocket Lab completes through the rest of the decade and whether it holds to that schedule.

Alphabet is fast-tracking an experimental AI satellite launch under Project Suncatcher, embedding custom AI chips into a Planet Labs satellite preparing for an upcoming orbital deployment. Management is using the project to test AI-powered orbital data centers as a new approach to remote computing capacity, treating the satellite as another node for AI workloads alongside Google Cloud, Gemini and TPU investments. The clearest next marker for investors is whether Alphabet reports concrete usage metrics or customer pilots linked to the Suncatcher satellite after the planned 1 October deployment, with references on future earnings calls to AI workload performance, energy efficiency or integration into Google Cloud services showing whether the trial is scaling beyond a one-off experiment. The article also notes two warning signs, both major, for Alphabet, and cites a fair value estimate of $429.