Killing ISS: A Stupid Idea That Might Just Happen
Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2014 to 2023 Office: Eliminate Human Space Exploration Programs, CBO
“This option would terminate NASA’s human space exploration and space operations programs, except for those necessary to meet space communications needs (such as communication with the Hubble Space Telescope). The agency’s science and aeronautics programs and robotic space missions would continue. Eliminating those human space programs would save $73 billion between 2015 and 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.”
China Unveils Space Station Research Plans, Space News
“China is positioning itself to provide orbital laboratory space, experiment racks and facilities to scientists worldwide following the completion of the U.S.-led international space station program. “China Space Station (CSS) will operate in orbit from 2022 to 2032. This period will provide much more opportunities to scientists in China and all of the world after the international space station,” Gu Yidong, president of the China Society of Space Research, said at the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research conference here Nov. 3 – 8.”
Keith’s note: NASA cannot fully develop and operate SLS – and extend ISS beyond 2020. There is simply not enough money to do both. But viable commercial alternatives and architectures abound. Watch as JSC squares off against MSFC and KSC and their respective congressional delegations. Meanwhile Russia is talking about a post-ISS world and China wants to create their own ISS – including the whole “international” bit. NASA took a generation and $80-100 billion to create ISS only to throw it away before it achieves its fullest potential? Crazy you say? We walked away from Apollo. NASA, Congress, and the White House are creatures of habit.
NASA Will Face Solomon’s Choice in 2014, earlier post
“Given that the funds are simply not going to be available to keep the ISS alive and functioning and to fully construct and operate the SLS/Orion system, something has to give. Are we going to have to kill one to insure the other’s survival? That is the choice that that is presenting itself – a clear recipe for disaster as far as NASA’s human space flight plans are concerned.”
Well splashing the ISS came within 1 vote at one time so it’s quite possible for it to happen.
If Congress does decide to do it, the maybe NASA could do the U.S. a favour and arrange to drop it on them.
Guess we’ll need to rename the SLS as the Rocket that ate NASA.
I’d only agree to kill the manned programs if we kept some funding for commercial crew experimentation, and if it came with a major increase in funding for the robotic science missions (as in a few billion). But realistically, killing the manned programs would probably start a death spiral for NASA, with pruning and cutbacks until it became a much smaller agency with maybe a few billion at best per year, if that. Think of what happened with the Superconducting Supercollider, or how little funding deep sea exploration gets.
And, of course, we’d lose a ton of institutional experience in operating manned missions that we would have to regain later on if we wanted to do manned missions elsewhere. Then again, it’s not like the manned program is actually going anywhere anytime soon – does anyone really think we’ll get to Mars on a NASA mission anytime this side of 2040? Or that asteroid mission? My guess is that the manned program goes nowhere after ISS comes crashing back down.
ISS is probably most vulnerable. JWST, despite the disastrous cost overruns – from $3B to $8B, it will be completed, needs to be launched and become the replacement of the Hubble. SLS and Orion have contractors with lobbying power and also international ties. That leaves ISS which is completed, without big cash laden contracts (spread more across many contractors and internal NASA programs).
A room with a view on ISS costs a space faring visitor about $8 million per day, cable not included and no coin operated vibrating bed. A Motel Six it is not although they do leave the lights on.
ISS costs have got to be reduced. Could they raise the rent on the international partners? Hand over one or two occupant slots to the partners? Hand over more operational duties? If they can do something to cut costs from $3B/year to say $2B would it be worth extending from 2020 to 2028 (the extended period in question)? If ISS costs can be cut that much, then the wiser choice would be to cut SLS and go commercial – SpaceX Falcon Heavy with Commercial Crew capabilities lifting astronauts to LEO.
Rendezvous & Docking. An Interplanetary vessel and propulsion system lifted by Falcon Heavy can be mated to an Orion capsule and service module. The propulsion system of a service module could potentially function as a safety backup. With crew launched by Orion on a Falcon 9/Delta IV or in a Dragon/Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy can provide the hardware to send a crew to a small asteroid, the Sun-Earth L1 or L2 or lazy eights around the Earth & Moon.
By the time one such mission is completed, NASA can provide financing to SpaceX or someone through competitively bidded contract to construct super heavy lift capability (Mars). But the facts now are that SpaceX has disruptive technology with the Falcon series and it has great potential for cost savings for NASA. NASA could write an RFP with cost and development time requirements that would leave just one corporation competing – SpaceX. Boeing and Lockheed will be forced to catch up or give up heavy lift to SpaceX.
Really Keith? NASA didn’t walk away from Apollo – Nixon dragged it off
kicking and screaming to return the funding to what REALLY mattered –
megafunding your f#$%^& ! military…
Mr. Morris is correct that our military sucks the life out of the country and nobody talks about it. It is the reason we don’t have nice things.
Uhmm, did we forget about where ~60% of the budget is spent? As a nation, we’ve decided that entitlement spending is the #1 priority, as seen in our budgets. Per OMB, in 2012 defense took 18.5% and entitlements took 62%. And defense has been declining as a percentage of the federal budge since the 60’s; about . Entitlements, on the way up since then. You really can’t hang this on defense outlays.
Social security has almost eliminated the once pervasive poverty of old age. Medicare has made it possible for older Americans to get essential health care. Moreover, any money cut from Social Security and Medicare will be demanded as tax cuts by the few people wealthy enough not to need them. Supporters of tax funding for spaceflight like us have to convince the public that spending money on space science and technology is worth a slight increase in their taxes.
Hopefully, in recognition of the Gettysburg address and equal rights for all, a global perspective on what the country really needs to move forward is considered.
Your point is well taken, although defense too has its problems. What to do?
For the 60%, 23% in Medicaid and Medicare, 22% in Social Security. So one could look at this ~60% and simply state that it is mostly the
older generation, where 2/3s of health care costs occur in the last 1/3 of life, and they simply did not pay in what it is now costing–not trying to blame anyone. The good news is that at least most of the 60% is spent in the US.
Medicare spending is rapidly increasing, not only due to of an influx of retiring baby boomers but also because health-care costs are rising faster than the nation’s gross domestic product. So what to do?
Obesity is a major driver in health care costs, ask any doctor or health care provider. Why not cut corn (syrup) subsidies and help reduce health care costs over the long term and eliminate ethanol that provides less miles per tank at the same cost? A few jobs are lost but the deficit is more balanced.
The ACA includes younger persons to start paying in earlier, or if they want to opt out, a penalty to provide a more realistic contribution for the Medicare years. What a great idea! But what about the costs rather than revenue?
The ACA has a 15-member panel to
propose cuts in 2015 if spending rises faster than inflation for health-care costs, a job Congress will not even speak about or if they do they refer to ‘death panels’- recall most health care costs occur later in life. Why not cut the 15% going to the insurance industry, when the mandate is 85% to health care, or would this cut jobs to non-health care providers? Cutting the deficit cuts jobs, at least in the short to intermediate term.
How about loopholes that let CEO’s take stock rather than salary to skirt taxes–$5B/year? How about cutting 72% of farm subsidies going to corporations and 50 billionaires? The US imports $300B of oil each year–why not double the fuel mileage and cut this deficit, perhaps with less mpg increases to semis, and help the environment as well? Why not cut oil subsidies and make alternative energy produced in the US to reduce the deficit? Why not mandate increases taxes when wars are declared?
As for ISS, start planning on replacing it with the deep space habitat that will travel BEO – asteroids and to Mars. Perhaps parts can be salvaged for stepping stone technology missions? SLS, Orion, and ISS all have short lives. Fortunately, NASA has quite a challenging future with economic spinoffs not possible the status quo that can help maintain its budget.
Yes, older Americans require more. But they also contributed a lifetime to the commonweal of a great nation. Jesus. Do I really have to make this argument??
People are “entitled” to things they paid into like Social Security and Medicare. That is why they are called entitlements. Cutting entitlements is theft from the people who paid into them. Discretionary spending is not entitled. The overwhelming majority of the discretionary budget is devoted to the military.
Seriously? What on earth is more important than taking care of citizens? That is why spending to protect ourselves from the travails of life IS #1 priority, as you put it.
Andrew Sexton Did you forget that Social Security pays for itself? You may have seen it on a paycheck. If Social Security were to be reduced, we wouldn’t get some of that 60% of the budget to play with for something else. Less would be paid in to Social Security.
There is no doubt that cuts across the board are required, but there are some cherry picked facts in this chain. Yes, defense is expensive and yes people should get out of entitlements what they put into it, but at present that simply is not happening. On average those taking from medicare are taking 3 times more out than they paid into it and this is set to get far worse when the baby boomers go into full retirement. Yes, at present social security is solvent, depending on how you want to look at it, but even by the most liberal estimates it will also be in the hole by the mid 2020’s. It is also interesting to note that the date of the mid 2020’s came from a CBO report estimating an average 5% GDP growth, which we have not seen since the mid 80’s, so I think it will likely come sooner than the mid 2020’s. Furthermore, there is not one dime in the social security trust fund. Every dime put into it was delved out as a treasury bond and we are making money off the interest, no different than the housing market was with mortgages before the market went bust. If people default, which gets more likely as the economy gets worse, we could overnight go from being solvent with SS to massively in debt. At present the unfunded liability from entitlements is already $35 trillion, which makes the $17 trillion dollar intergovernmental debt look pretty paltry in comparison. The point being, that while I agree that pragmatic cuts should come for defense for a plethora of reasons, we could zero out the DoD and NASA and it would make no difference. If we do not make massive cuts and reorganizations to entitlements we will be utterly bankrupt before the dawn of the next century. Gutting human space flight makes no sense as an attempt to prevent this.
Johnson began shutting Apollo down in 1968. The savior was going to be efficiency in HSF space ops using a space shuttle-that term was coined in 67 or 68. We learned nothing about efficiency and lack of efficiency in ops continues today.
“Johnson began shutting Apollo down in 1968”? Never heard that before… given that Johnson announced he wasn’t running for re-election in March 1968, it seems unlikely. I did a bit of looking online, and I see no mention of it. There is an August 1968 memo from James Webb limiting production of Apollo hardware (http://history.nasa.gov/SP-…, but that was at a time when Webb knew Johnson would not be president, and seems to have been something Webb initiated not Johnson (http://history.nasa.gov/SP-… “… Even before the first mission to the Moon, NASA Administrator James E. Webb sensed that the political support for a continued large-scale space effort was unlikely to be sustained, whoever won the 1968 presidential election. He proved prescient, and in 1972, when it became clear that the Nixon administration would not grant NASA the budget needed both to develop the Space Shuttle and to continue to use the Saturn V, the NASA leadership reluctantly gave up the capability to produce the vehicle.”
Get some of the NASA histories to get a full picture; but even you said above that by 1968 the production of Apollo hardware was being curtailed. Without additional hardware there were not going to be more missions. In 1968 they reduced Apollo from going to Apollo 25 to only Apollo 20. Subsequently they eliminated Apollo 20 and then they took the last two Saturn Vs to be used for Skylab. Johnson even said as he signed the orders eliminating the five Apollo missions that ‘knowing the foolishness of the American populace they would piss Apollo away and nothing would be left.’
My point was that it seems unlikely that Johnson would initiate curtailment of Apollo. Your Johnson quote reinforces that (according to a Space Review article the wording was slightly different, and said to Wally Schirra). For fiscal 1968 Johnson requested $455 million for the Apollo Applications Program (the follow on to the basic Apollo program which Johnson initiated in 1964), but congress only budgeted $122 million. See the Wired article “Ending Apollo”: http://www.wired.com/wireds…. That would appear to be the reason for the curtailment, and it seems clear it was not wanted by Johnson.
Apparently you are not a historian. History is not written according to wishful thinking but rather by the actions that the historical figures take. It was not whether Johnson was likely or unlikely or whether he wanted to or not; Johnson did curtail the NASA budget and with it the production of Apollo hardware; the country could not afford it. Johnson told James Webb in 1966 or 67 to get the NASA budget down towards 1% from a high of nearly 5 %. In 1969 and 1970 Nixon went along with Johnson’s actions.
I never claimed to be a historian… I did post what I felt likely based on my recollection of the period. In addition, I did offer specific facts, as well as interpretations from folks who do claim to be historians which support that recollection. I wasn’t doing any selective filtering, I was just relating what I found. I did do a little more looking just now, and found a historian, John M. Longsdon, who supports your position. See http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50… (although again he has a different version of your LBJ quote). I’d have to read his book to see if I agree with his assessment. The budget summaries, source documents, and most of the historical interpretations I came across from other historians do not appear to support that, but then again, I’m not a historian. Well, I think this thread has run it’s course, well at least for me it has. Later.
Postscript: one final post on this because I came across more detailed writings by Logsdon on Johnson even though I didn’t read/buy any of his books. Logsdon does write in some detail here: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-….
In particular he says “The NASA budget peaked at $5.25 billion in FY 1965 and then began a gradual decline. While Lyndon B. Johnson was strongly committed to completing Apollo, he found himself constrained by the budget demands of his Great Society programs and the war in Vietnam, and was unwilling to provide significant financial support for major post-Apollo space initiatives.”
This contrasts with his remark that NASA’s budget in Johnson’s final years “began a precipitous downward slide” (in the article “Ten Presidents and NASA” which I linked to in my previous post). Something that seemed at odds with budget info one can easily find online.
The common thread in both is that Johnson was not committed to and did not identify a major *new* post Apollo space effort. And that it was really as a consequence of this that NASA’s budgets were not sustained in following years. That’s not to say though that Johnson had abandoned the Apollo program and the Saturn launch vehicle in the middle of his presidency. Apparently (see: http://www.nss.org/resource… in his FY68 budget message to congress Johnson endorsed the $454 million for the AAP, saying “We have no alternative unless we wish to abandon the manned space capability we have created.” However, apparently (see Logson’s chapter) Webb felt that he was not getting *enough* support from Johnson, and given that the next president likely would not support both Apollo and the space shuttle, Webb cut short the production run of the Saturn V in August 1968.
We’ll never know if Johnson would have continued to support Appolo derived missions if he had run and won in 1968. It seems likely to me he would have, but at a modest level, and that in any event this would have just postponed the inevitable. Following presidents would have likely also killed Apollo based programs and pursued the shuttle.
We do know that Nixon did do this. Probably for a variety of reasons, including cost, NASA’s recommendations, and the fact that Apollo wasn’t his program.
Well that really is all on this topic from me… for now.
Apollo v Vietnam
ISS v War on Terror
Which has been value for money and (more importantly) beneficial?
Try
Apollo and Vietnam
ISS and War on Terror
When the money for the war is cut the money for NASA is cut.
Nixon was just a continuation of the trend of declining funding for NASA, which started after NASA funding peaked in 1966. Public support just wasn’t there for additional missions beyond the ones they carried out with the Apollo Program.
Of course what will be missing in this debate is that EVEN IF ISS IS SPLASHED the NASA budget STILL will not support SLS/Orion plus missions to fly on it. So the choice is — ISS plus commercial cargo plus commercial crew plus something that costs $2-$3 billion a year, or else no ISS and no commercial cargo and no commercial crew, with SLS/Orion but no missions to fly on it. Should be easy.
Would I accept the deorbit of the ISS in 2020 in exchange for humans to extend beyond LEO for the first time in almost 50 years? Yep.
If you think that you’ll actually get that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that’s going for cheap….
If we’re not going BEO then might as well keep the ISS until 2028.
Congress is not going to fund human spaceflights BEO. So if the ISS is deorbited before/around 2020 that is the end of NASA HSF.
You’re likely to get half of what you wish for.
Guess which half.
We have the perfect set up to see this happen. We have several politically unestute, non-leaders at the helm of NASA and HSF, we have a President who has been openly hostile, we have a CBO recommending it, and without any strong proHSF congressional leadership. Probably biggest factor of all has been a failure (1) to actually put in place the mechanisms for efficient use of ISS and (2) failure to efficiently develop the next generatiion system a without huge new cash infusions, (3) failure to effectively communicate the value of HSF. Unless these things are dramaticallyturned around, quickly.. . Good luck to us all. We will need it.
I have always felt and stated here that this was coming. It has been clear to me since they destroyed the tooling for the External Tank, that the era of manned spaceflight was being actively managed to termination.
I always thought that the ISS would be “splashed” through a “made up” debris hit to the pressurized compartments. “To the lifeboat before we loose orbital stability…” … then, “the end.”
All that will be left is SMD and withered technology efforts.
Keith,
KSC is where ISS payload processing and Falcon cargo missions and commercial crew will fly from. And CASIS is there. I’m not so sure KSC sides against ISS. After all, 39B mods are almost finished…
– Jim
SpaceX is building its own launch facilities in Texas and a lot of activity will move there. Orion is being assembled at KSC. SLS will be assembled and launched from KSC. Bill Nelson is one of SLS’ biggest supporters. KSC has much more to gain from the SLS gravy train. As for CASIS – it is a congressional creation of Bill Nelson and Space Florida that has not come close to the milestones originally set for it. At best CASIS will be a sideshow.
Commercial satellite launches may move to Texas, but Elon Musk is extremely serious about launching the commercial crew Dragon from KSC. Unfortunately some people at KSC still view SLS/Orion as “us” and Falcon/Dragon as “them”. This view is damaging to our future, since only Commercial Crew has any chance of bringing human launch back to the Space Coast.
Yes, Chairman Nelson is a great Advocate for SLS. But he isn’t going to want to kill off the program that keeps missions flying from the Space Coast… just to feed a program whose first flight will be in the future. At the same time, as you point out, ISS utilization needs to grow quickly. CASIS has a big job ahead of it.
I don’t see Nelson as being a particularly strong advocate. I agree he is about the most NASA has but he has not been too successful. He pushed for support of Constellation including with a Democratic President, and that got him nowhere. He has been pushing for more funding for NASA and crying about starving of the space program but none of those cries seem to be heard or reacted to positively. His only success was in getting his old commander Charlie Bolden promoted to Administrator, but I think with that he helped to sink the entire program.
Nelson, Shelby and Hutchison were responsible for recreating CxP in the form of SLS and Orion. Politically, they all had a lot of lose with dropping of CxP. Now, it is unlikely Nelson and Shelby would sacrifice SLS and/or Orion for ISS. This all boils down to fitting NASA into a smaller budget (~$16B). They could set a mandate of decommissioning ISS in 2020 and reduce ISS occupants and funding to CASIS to lower annual costs. That might save $500M. The Mars program is likely to take a hit. We have the energizer bunny – Opportunity and Curiosity that will last a decade. And now Maven arriving in 11 months. The Phoenix-type lander and the Mars 2020 Rover could cut $100M on average over the next 3 years if they are delayed. The remaining $400M ? You trim $50M here and there across Center budgets (let the Centers deal with their cuts internally), reduce programs the same and you have $400M.
I think every program mentioned deserves to stay. SLS should be abandoned for a commercial heavy lifter. A Falcon Heavy plus commercial crew would provide the means to send astronauts to an earth-orbited NEA, to the Sun-Earth L1 or L2 or fly lazy-8s around the Moon. Mars will need to be an international effort and Falcon XX or the competition that Boeing or Lockheed might choose to develop would lift the HW to LEO for assembly.
NASA talks about letting commercial crew fly to iss in 2017. How soon should it be before Spacex will have dragon rider ready to fly and all commercial crew test /demo flight??? 2015???? Is the NASA safety review an attempt to slow commercial crew in an attempt to maker orion/SLS look better?? Seems to me ISS needs commercial crew service before 2017?
I think you are right. Nelson and KSC needs ISS to justify Commercial Crew. Bolden has emphasized that without ISS, support for the corporations in Commercial Crew is lost and vital support to these smaller aerospace firms is ended prematurely.
SLS is only in their PDR phase of the life cycle. It could be halted. In the time it takes to launch the first SLS, three Falcon Heavy launches are on the SpaceX manifest. I think we should continue ISS but with more pressure to improve efficiency and lower costs. Also, keep Orion. But SLS which extends back to 2005 when Constellation started has outlived its usefulness. It is obsolete before first launch and even before CDR. Poor management, funding cuts, redesigns and restarts and also the advent of the Falcon series has made SLS too costly and too late. Falcon Heavy has sufficient performance for early HEOMD objectives.
if the US (ie NASA) can’t afford to run the ISS, then as an option to splashing the thing how about giving it over to the international community and hopefully (yes, hopefully) China will see this as an opportunity to participate with the reat of the world and to learn from the ISS. Then maybe it’d make “sense” for China to expand on the ISS rather than start from scratch.
But seriously, how much does it cost to operate the ISS for a year ? $1B? $2B ??
It costs NASA over $2B per year because of all the civil servants and contractors that charge to the program. Like any NASA HSF program, it is a jobs program and could be executed at a fraction of the cost. I’m sure the international community could operate it much cheaper. But they would not be able to maintain the US hardware without spares which only we could provide. It doesn’t matter if it stays up or comes back, nothing earth-shattering is being done on it anyway. NASA HSF is like a brain-dead patient on life support. As long as the cash IV is flowing, technically it will live. The heart beats and lungs breathe, but it will never get up and walk again. The brain is dead.
I may be miss remembering, but this has come up before, or in recent years. Seems that Russia and ESA (I don’t know about JAXA) said if the US were to quit ISS support then they would just flat take the responsibility on themselves and keep the ISS going until 2020 or beyond.
My guess would be what really happens is the US keeps it’s commitment to the 2020 date and SLS money reduced to a point of a super stretched schedule if not a shift to a down sized system…. leading to a long long slow death for USA manned space flight.
ESA and JAXA budgets are a pittance compared to NASA. Them doing ISS on their own is an amusing concept. Nope, ISS cannot be run without US involvement. Nor Russian – Systems from both sides are so intertwined now that they cannot practically be separated.
ISS is not a footstep in space, it is a foothold. If we give it up, we will not be stuck in LEO. We will be stuck on the ground.
It will certainly undermine most of the US need to go to LEO, including funding for commercial crew programs. We’d still have Orion, though, at least until it gets cancelled.
We had one chance to take advantage when the VSE was announced, but Mike Griffin squandered that chance and put us on the irreversible path we are on. He shut down the Shuttle program to the point where it could not continue, before having a replacement. We could have had that replacement in time had it been a Shuttle-C derivative or something like that. But instead, he pursued a personal rocket concept that was technically flawed and compounded that problem by accelerating the technology development for Ares V that we could not afford in parallel. His plan even called for ditching ISS before the Shuttle replacement was flying so he could pour that money down his rat-hole of a concept. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter because NASA’s development expertise was decimated during Shuttle ops we could never successfully do large-scale development again. We will be stuck on the ground if commercial space can’t find a way to make money doing it.
Space is a harsh environment, and I’m assuming that as ISS ages, at some point maintenance costs will escalate rapidly. Kind of like an old car that constantly needs repair. Out passed 2020 does anyone have any insight into the likely maintenance picture of ISS?
I remember reading that so far it has been less maintenance than expected. But nobody knows the future.
Read this yesterday in an online article about the 15th anniversary of the ISS: “All of the modules of the ISS were initially designed for a 15-year lifespan. But the addition of shielding and upgrades makes even the first section, which lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on November 20 1998, good to go for another 15 years to come, Hartman said.” Dan Hartman is the deputy program manager for ISS.
Sweet. I say keep it up. Now I wonder how the solar panels are doing- especially the one that kept grinding. Is the water recycler thing going reliably? What else? Getting VASIMR up there for more efficient boosting – less fuel needed?
Probably the recent furlough reminded everyone how non-critical all of the NASA functions are.
This is utter nonsense. We can easily afford to do both with more for R&D & Commercial Crew left over. The Pols always have the money to burn for every other Tom, Dick & Harry project in the world. We spend billions and billions to kill Mujahadin in every dusty hell hole on the planet; or to give COLA’s in the recent past to people even when there was no corresponding increase in the cost of living in those years; but now theres no more dinero to push back the frontier of science & exploration for the nation, ourselves and our posterity? If this is the new reality, then we really have become Portugal; and would the last one to leave please turn out the lights.
I hope NASA has learnt to launch the replacement spacestation before deorbiting the ISS.
Doing it the other way round gets too many operational staff fired.
A lively and enjoyable conversation.
I wonder what happens to Mr. Musk’s HS program if the ISS is gone? Is he building a rocket with no destination?
Possibly a Bigelow private station…maybe? I am assuming there are still plans to send one of his inflatables to the ISS in 2015?
SpaceX might fly up a Bigelow unit and there’s your destination 🙂
Keith is correct that the politicos are ‘creatures of habit’ and would have no qualms of killing ISS. The current administration has zero interest in the space program and Congress would have no problem giving ISS funding the ax to keep the the aerospace workforce employed, working on the SLS, as Apollo was sacrificed to fund Shuttle.