Portal Space Systems has reached Earth orbit for the second time this year, successfully launching the startup’s first free-flying spacecraft, Starburst-1, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Portal’s Starburst-1 lifted off Tuesday at 7:04 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The spacecraft separated from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission about 57 minutes later.

Within hours of deployment, the Bothell, Wash.-based company reported that the desk-sized craft had established ground communications, stabilized itself, and successfully deployed its solar array to become power positive.

It marks the second significant milestone for Portal this year, following the March debut of Mini-Nova — a tissue-box-sized technology demonstration payload that flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission to test critical control and power systems in orbit.

Portal self-funded Starburst-1 to accelerate its flight timeline and prove out hardware for prospective customers, achieving orbit in less than a year since introducing the Starburst vehicle concept in November 2025.

Co-founder and CEO Jeff Thornburg emphasized that urgency is baked into the startup’s operational philosophy, noting that customers require spacecraft that can shift rapidly in orbit.

“Speed can’t just be part of the product. It has to be part of the company building it,” Thornburg said in a statement. “Our customers need spacecraft that move quickly in orbit and a company that moves with the same urgency to get them there. We put our own capital behind Starburst-1 because proving hardware in flight is how we earn their confidence.”

Thornburg shared video of the launch and deployment of Starburst-1 on LinkedIn.

Starburst is an ESPA-class spacecraft designed to execute rapid maneuvers within a specific orbital regime, giving commercial and defense operators greater operational flexibility. The vehicle shares the majority of its core systems and manufacturing processes with Supernova, Portal’s larger upcoming spacecraft built for rapid travel across different orbital regimes, with flight data from Starburst-1 directly informing both platforms.

Starburst-1 is carrying experimental technologies from three partner companies to test in orbit:

• Zenno Astronautics’ Supertorquer: A superconducting magnetic attitude-control system designed to orient the spacecraft using Earth’s magnetic field — conserving onboard propellant — while testing whether its magnetic field can shield sensitive electronics from radiation.
• TRL11’s Fovea M1: A specialized camera system providing live video of Starburst-1 and its surroundings, including visual confirmation of the solar array deployment.
• Atomic-6’s Space Armor: Protective tiles engineered to shield the spacecraft from high-speed orbital debris without creating additional secondary debris.

Since emerging from stealth in 2024, Portal has raised $75 million in funding — including a $50 million round in April — from investors including Geodesic Capital, Mach33, Booz Allen Ventures, AlleyCorp, and FUSE, alongside receiving critical SBIR and STRATFI support from the U.S. military.

GeekWire got an inside look at Portal’s 8,000-square-foot Bothell development and testing lab earlier this year. To prepare for future demand — including a dedicated 2028 Falcon 9 mission known as Motus Via Sol that will carry multiple Starburst spacecraft and the first Supernova — Portal has been expanding its footprint.

The company — No. 107 on the GeekWire 200 index of top-ranked Pacific Northwest startups — is in the process of transitioning its satellite manufacturing operations into a new 65,000-square-foot facility in Bothell, which is slated to be fully operational by next year and capable of producing up to 16 Starburst and 12 Supernova spacecraft annually.

Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.

The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks.

As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”

“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

The company said previously that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials a user shares “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”

Business partners: The standoff between the tech giants is especially notable because the two companies work together: Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s Graviton chips.

It’s part of a larger debate over who controls the online shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy items on behalf of consumers.

Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI.

On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment.

The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.

Security implications: Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer prompts it to do so, Amazon says. Because the agent doesn’t identify itself, the company says, that amounts to an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts, processing transactions and handling sensitive data without Amazon’s knowledge or consent.

Amazon said agents that operate openly help keep the customer experience safe and reliable, and that other services buying on a customer’s behalf typically do so with the merchant’s agreement. It cited food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with.

“Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” Amazon’s spokesperson said in the statement.

Legal maneuvering: Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking law.

The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on Sept. 10. However, the ruling left one avenue open for Amazon: claims built on contracts and terms of service. The message Muse users are now seeing doesn’t accuse anyone of hacking but cites Amazon’s Conditions of Use.

How Muse works: Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal agent that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one-off questions, connecting to services including email, calendar, payments, dining and shopping.

It’s free, with paid subscription tiers, and available on iOS, Android, muse.ai and WhatsApp.

Meta says the agent runs on a secure virtual machine, with its own browser, and checks with the user before sensitive actions like sending an email or making a purchase. A separate monitoring agent called Sentinel has to approve anything Muse sends to the internet.

The Muse launch materials describe the mechanism now at the center of the dispute: If a service has a public API, Muse can connect to it using credentials the user provides. If it has no API at all, Meta says, the agent “can use the service through a browser the way you would.”

Muse has caught on fast. A week after launch, it became the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Early users have described it switching an auto insurance policy, hunting down discount codes at checkout, and loading an online grocery cart.

Amazon launched Alexa for Shopping in May, an AI agent that researches products and makes recommendations. Its own agentic shopping feature, Buy for Me, finds items on external brands’ sites, but the company points out that Buy for Me identifies itself and lets brands opt out.

Agility Robotics unveiled the next version of its Digit humanoid robot, which it says is designed to work safely alongside people in warehouses and factories without the barriers that are usually required.

The Salem, Ore.-based company, which is preparing to go public through a $2.5 billion SPAC merger, said Digit 5 is its first humanoid built for “cooperatively safe” work at scale.

The robot uses AI and multiple sensors to watch for nearby people. Depending on the situation, it steers around them, stops or sits down. Visual and audio cues signal what it’s about to do, and a separate safety controller triggers its responses when someone gets too close.

Digit 5 can lift up to 50 pounds, 40% more than its predecessor, and reach objects as high as 7.2 feet off the ground, up from 5.5 feet, according to the company. A new battery runs for 90 minutes and recharges in 9 minutes, which Agility says allows more than 20 hours of work in a 24-hour day. Its grippers can be swapped for different jobs.

“We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors,” said Agility CEO Peggy Johnson, a former Microsoft executive and Magic Leap CEO, in the announcement.

Digit 4, the current model, has mostly moved totes, logging more than 65,000 hours at customers including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm, according to the company. Agility says Digit 5 will take on more of a facility’s work — unloading pallets, tending machines, gathering parts and inspecting items before loading them back onto pallets for shipment.

Amazon, an early Agility investor, has run multiple pilots of earlier Digit models, including one GeekWire observed at a warehouse south of Seattle in 2023. It bought five Digit robots for $1.05 million, according to Agility’s S-4 registration statement, filed with the SEC this month in connection with its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company.

Agility says it had more than $300 million in multi-year orders for Digit 5 as of May, contingent on hitting certain milestones. According to the S-4, those orders are from one customer, for 1,000 robots over three years. The filing doesn’t name the customer, but it also describes a May deal for at least 1,000 robots with a “related party,” an accounting term for those with close ties to a company, such as major investors.

Agility had $1.78 million in net sales in 2025, up from $310,000 the year before. Its loss from operations doubled to $140.2 million.

Its auditor, Grant Thornton, included a going-concern warning in the report, citing substantial doubt about the company’s ability to keep operating. Agility said in the filing that the cash forecasts behind that conclusion didn’t take into account the SPAC deal, which the companies said in June could provide more than $620 million in gross cash proceeds before any shareholder redemptions.

In the S-4, Agility names Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apptronik, Figure AI and 1X Technologies among its competitors, many of which it describes as well-funded.

Early access to Digit 5 is expected to begin in the first half of 2027, with general availability by the end of the year. The robots are assembled at the company’s RoboFab factory in Salem, which is designed to produce up to 10,000 robots a year.

Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web conferencing system that could record and replay live sessions. He filed for a patent without the help of a patent attorney, stuffing two CDs full of C++ source code into the application to show his work.

The patent was issued in 2010, and years later, after Kohler had joined Microsoft, the Redmond company licensed his technology for its Teams video-conferencing platform.

When YouTube later added the ability for viewers to pause, rewind, and change the playback speed of live video, Kohler saw in the feature what he considered to be his own invention. Kohler, who lives in Bellevue, Wash., sued Google for patent infringement in U.S. District Court in Seattle in April 2023.

But rather than defending the feature’s originality, Google argued that Kohler’s patent was too abstract to be eligible for patent protection. The district court agreed and dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that decision.

Both decisions cited Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for software patent eligibility by holding that an inventor cannot patent an “abstract idea” implemented with generic technology.

Since then, Alice has been used to invalidate thousands of software patents, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to revisit the standard. Now, Kohler is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case, not to overturn Alice, but to clarify how courts should apply it.

“The patent legal system has become hostile to inventors,” Kohler said. “Because of Alice, my case got stopped before it even started.”

How Alice changed patent law

When Alice was handed down, patent trolls were on the rise: shadowy entities that bought vague patents to sue tech companies on shaky claims of patent infringement. 

That changed under the 2014 ruling, which requires that a patent clear two hurdles: the idea cannot be “abstract,” and it must propose a sufficiently “inventive concept.” The standard has become “a crucial tool” for fighting patent trolls, in the words of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But critics say it’s ill-suited to software patents. Because software inventions often rely on pre-existing hardware to run the source code, courts tend to find many of these patents to be insufficiently inventive.

Jon McMichael, an IP litigation partner at Fenwick who has written about Kohler’s case, said this challenge is common in patents where inventors rely on general-purpose computers and off-the-shelf hardware to implement their ideas. 

“That’s where those patent holders run into more problems,” he said.

Experts say the courts’ application of Alice has broadened to invalidate the patents of real inventors in addition to those of patent trolls. Toshiko Takenaka, a University of Washington IP law professor who is working on an academic paper about Kohler’s case, said Alice’s ability to quickly defeat bad actors comes “at the expense of the best inventors.”

“Software patents are too frequently being invalidated without giving the owner the opportunity to defend it,” Takenaka said. “This inventor provided something ordinary computers could not do, right? So therefore, in my view, this is an eligible invention.”

Some judges have raised similar concerns, including Federal Circuit Chief Judge Kimberly Moore, who authored the opinion affirming the dismissal of Kohler’s case. In a 2020 concurrence in a separate case, Moore wrote that she and her fellow judges were “unanimous in our unprecedented plea for guidance” from the Supreme Court on how to interpret Alice, which she called a “patent-killing judicial exception of our own creation.”

A quest for legal clarity

After filing his patent, Kohler spent more than 15 years at Microsoft, where he helped launch HoloLens and rose to senior director of product management for the Surface line. He later served as a product leader at Meta for its Horizon platform.

Kohler says he’s hopeful the Supreme Court will agree to hear his case because his petition takes a new approach, asking the court to clarify how to apply the Alice test rather than disputing the test entirely. His new attorney, Kathryn Jean Miller, who does not have prior patent law experience, was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court bar for this case.

“It’s me and my lawyer against the world,” Kohler said. “I never thought I would be doing something like this.”

The Supreme Court has declined more than 89 petitions related to Alice, some of which had the Solicitor General’s endorsement. The justices will decide on Sept. 28 whether to hear Kohler’s case and likely announce their decision the following week.

Kohler is hoping that other inventors will file amicus briefs, which are due by Sept. 23, to illustrate to the court the need for clarification.

“There’s a broad coalition of people who would like some sanity brought back to patent law, from small inventors and startups to former judges,” Kohler said. “That’s what I’m trying to do with my petition.”