Apartments and Houses: The Warranty of Habitability

“The trend towards greater consumer protection so evident in the products liability field is clearly discernible in the sale of new homes by the builder-vendor, and in the leasing of apartments by landlords. Some of the fundamental concepts of real property law, especially those which make no sense in modern society, have been, or are being, overruled and superseded by more enlightened and public policy-minded decisions of both the federal and state courts. It seems safe to predict that the warranty of habitability which governs the sale of new homes by the builder-vendor, adopted by a substantial majority of jurisdictions, will soon become the majority rule as to apartments.

Phoenix and the New Satellite Paradigm Created by HISat

A satlet is a satellite architecture component into which the functional capabilities of a conventional spacecraft are decomposed and can then be aggregated back together to provide desired subsystem capabilities. NovaWurks has successfully developed satlet prototypes for the DARPA Phoenix program. These smaller disaggregated subsystem building blocks are called HISats, or Hyper-Integrated Satlets. By reassembling a sufficient amount of HISats and payloads, a spacecraft with the required capabilities can be formed by aggregation of their resources. HISats are distributed across a platform and interact through a variety of links. Removing some of the physical location dependencies between the resources of a spacecraft brings several attributes, such as reliability and flexibility. Building capabilities by aggregation of resources provides rapid scalability and robustness. A spacecraft bus which is composed of resource modules can be readily fit together to support a variety of payloads. However decomposing and disaggregating a spacecraft, and letting the different resources manifest separately, leads to several architectural and technological concerns which are related to the shared resources within the aggregated satlet network. Investigation of these challenges, solutions, and demonstration results from Phase 1 of the program are presented. Concepts for future space systems are discussed