Yet Another Slow Motion Advisory Committee on Human Space Flight
Keith’s note: The National Research Council has created the Committee on Human Spaceflight – yet another semi-annual effort to study and advise Congress on NASA’s human space flight activities: “In accordance with Section 204 of the NASA Authorization Act 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) will appoint an ad hoc committee to undertake a study to review the long-term goals, core capabilities, and direction of the U.S. human spaceflight program and make recommendations to enable a sustainable U.S. human spaceflight program.”
Do these congressionally-mandated NRC policy committees ever really say anything useful or new about space policy? These NASA efforts are quasi-regular exercises where a group of familiar names an a few new ones are brought together for a series of sedate meetings that last for more than a year. You see, congressional authorization committees direct NASA to pay for these studies when they feel that Congress needs a blue ribbon panel to produce verbiage that they can use to beat NASA and the current administration over the head when Congress feels that they are not being listened to.
Once completed, the policy reports are only cited if the have useful sentences that support (or seem to support) a niche position that one politician or committee may take. By definition, NRC reports are never controversial but rather embody lots of slow-motion consensus and inevitable watering down of important issues. Its not that these are substandard efforts by any means since the NRC is an impressive, competent organization. At most, however, these studies take a long time to conduct and are usually a blip on the radar when they issue their final document.
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 was signed into law on 11 October 2010. It has taken more than 2 years for everyone to get around to starting this study. The start date listed for this committee is November 2012 and its report is due for delivery in May 2014. That’s 1 year, 7 months. This NRC is responding to authorizing legislation passed in 2010 by the 111th Congress, with a committee now being requested by the 112th Congress, and its report will be presented to yet another Congress (113th) during the second year of a new presidential administration in mid-2014 – one where policies are in place that will differ from those in place when the task was assigned, with budgets that differ from initial conditions under which the study was undertaken.
Net result: the committee’s advice will be out of synch with reality and somewhat overtaken by events having taken a total of 3 years, 7 months to complete. Oh yes: the cost of this study? $3.6 million.. The soonest that a NASA budget could be crafted that took this committee’s advice into account would be the FY 2016 budget request. NASA and OMB will interact on the FY 2016 budget during Fall 2014 and it won’t be announced until early 2015 – 4 1/2 years after this committee and its advice was requested in the NASA Authorization Act 2010.
Further, this study is about the substance contained in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. Authorization acts say lots of interesting and specific things that never come to pass when budgets and policies are actually crafted and enacted. At best, these NRC committees look at what NASA should do or could do – not what it will do – those decisions are made by a wholly different and far less disciplined process – one that operates much more swiftly than a multi-year advisory committee is going to be able to keep pace with.
If only the advisory process were more responsive to the issues in play – and done in real time – perhaps these committees could actually find their considered, expert advice work its way to actual implementation.
Oh yes: If Gov. Romney wins, he has said that he will convene his own blue ribbon panel to look at American space policy – and human spaceflight is clearly going to be one of the top issues addressed. That committee will likely finish with its task (much of its decisions having been pre-ordained by a Romney Administration) before the NRC team even gets a draft report out for internal review. Whose advice will prevail?
A committee like this is the place to record what NASA intends to do for the next 20 years. Unfortunately NASA would have to decide what it wants to do before telling the committee.
Keith, your comments here on this committee are mostly fair, but perhaps not complete. This is a committee that has been tasked with trying to drill down into the real purpose of human space flight, and the degree to which it can be taken as an activity of value to the nation. We’ve heard this stuff before, over and over, from dedicated human space flight advocates, and people whose careers have been associated with human space flight. But that’s not who we want to hear it from. I’d like to hear it from people who are not blood-coupled to human space flight, and ideally also to understand how U.S. taxpayers rationalize their expenditure on human space flight. I look at the eventual report from this group less as answers, and more as kicking off a conversation that has been desperately needed for many years. I hope Congress, that chartered the report, feels that way too.
We could blather about “exploration” or “inspiration”, but we largely don’t know what those words mean, as applied to human space flight. Those are the words we use when we don’t want to really think about rationale for human space flight. This committee will, hopefully, really think about it, and perhaps come to some consensus about what those two words really mean.
The people selected for this study are (with one or two exceptions) disconnected from historical human space flight. They are well qualified to not only assess the science and national defense value of human space flight, but also examine the ways in which this activity has become, in many respects, a cultural tradition.
I too would have hoped that such a committee could conclude more promptly, but the questions they are asking are long-term ones. Those questions have been around for a long time, and they’re not going to go away.
What comes out of this committee could be of fundamental importance in strengthening the commitment of the public and Congress to human space flight.
I’ve been watching these NRC committees work here in Washington for more than 25 years. I’d like to think this effort was different than all of those that preceded it but based on personal/professional experience, I am not expecting anything new.
Well said. I too am hopeful for this committee, but it will be a major challenge for it to come up with anything new.
This is a committee that has been tasked with trying to drill down into the real purpose of human space flight, and the degree to which it can be taken as an activity of value to the nation.
If that is its task then it is doomed to failure, which is not surprising as the last several of these have failed as well. The composition of the group is simply incompatible with the stated purpose. Of all the members Bob Crippin is the only one with a modicum of business experience. Marsha Smith is a voice of the aerospace status quo who supports the SLS.
Norm Augustine’s last commission was of this type as well. I remember talking to Jeff Greason about this and asking him (Jeff is an ISRU supporter) why ISRU was not included in the Augustine II commission report. Jeff’s response was that Augustine simply did not believe it was possible and thus excised and omitted any mention of it in his report.
Max Plank once quipped that science advances one funeral at a time. It is beginning to look like this will be the case in aerospace as well. This is ludicrous on its face as aerospace used to be the most forward thinking industry out there but as the lure of government contracts and the revolving door between generals and aerospace executive positions has become hardened aerospace for the most part has become reactive and not much more than their Soviet counterparts.
As a putting money where mouth is, I am currently working with a group of people from an industry completely unrelated to aerospace on a means to extract upwards of 100% of the oxygen from lunar regolith with the waste products being metals. The second phase will be the separation of the metals. When I talked to people in this non aerospace related industry about this, the first part is a complete no brainer to them that is being done today. The second part is an extension of work that they have also been doing for over a decade now. When I mention to them that senior aerospace and NASA officials don’t think that this is possible, the almost universal response is a snort of laughter.
We spend hundreds of millions of dollars to add a decimal point or two to the granularity of the lunar gravity field, but less than 0.1% of that amount of funding on ISRU. While I support GRAIL and its science goals, the relative amount of money spent goes to the heart of the disconnect that is out there in how human spaceflight development money is spent.
Without the economic and industrial development of the solar system as a core value, this NAS advisory committee might as well just wrap up and go home for all the value that it will bring to the taxpaying public or our common future.
It’s a defensible statement that such a committee is doomed to failure if it tries to come up with final answers. Formally, that’s what it’s task is. But we all know better. As I said, what this committee should be trying to achieve is kicking off a national conversation about the importance of human space flight. That conversation is desperately needed. If they run it right, the committee doesn’t have to fail in trying to do that.
That being said, I’m puzzled about your references to Crippen and Smith. Huh? Not this committee. If you’re going to complain about a committee, then please make sure you’re talking about the right one. Methinks you’re referring to the DEPS committee on “NASA’s Strategic Direction”, which is an entirely different one, and one to which ISRU more cleanly relates.
As to ISRU, that’s all well and good, but it really isn’t clear what that has to do with human space flight. If this committee decides that ISRU needs human space flight, it’ll sure be interesting to hear why. There are many reasons why it needn’t require human space flight, at least for lunar work. In fact, it’s arguments like this, that go off on tangents that don’t clearly connect to the subject at hand, that have confused human space flight policy.
“If this committee decides that ISRU needs human space flight, it’ll sure be interesting to hear why.“
Helen,
From my perspective, you’ve got it turned around. Try thinking in terms of human space flight needing ISRU. I suspect people will argue with that as a short-term goal, but as a long-term goal it’s an absolute must. At this point in history I think we need to be better combining our long- and short-term goals, so that everything comes together when we get back to the point of being able to fly HSF programs. The only alternative is limiting ourselves to more brief flags and footprints missions, which are a pointless luxury which we can no longer afford, and robot landers can do them just as well and a lot cheaper.
Steve
“Try thinking in terms of human space flight needing ISRU.”
No, I won’t try that. Why? Because that’s not what this is about. This is about WHY human space flight is of value. If human space flight is of value because it can use ISRU, that’s just flaming crazy. Why, by that token, food is of value because it gives food stores something to sell!
Now, IF human space flight (actually, a whole lot of it) has value to the nation, then it’s quite reasonable that ISRU could be important. But don’t turn the argument on its head.
Your comment hugely prejudges the whole issue. It assumes that our primary goal is unambiguously to be sending large numbers of people to distant cosmic destinations. There is hardly consensus on that. If this committee concludes that a primary justification for human spaceflight is to expand the species, and that goal serves the U.S. taxpayer, those are words that Congress could use. Maybe they won’t. But maybe the committee can come up with some other reason for sending large numbers of people to distant cosmic destinations.
T-shirts, DTARS? Ah, that’s how we can establish human space flight value to the American public. Good thinking!
There is hardly consensus on that. If this committee concludes that a primary justification for human spaceflight is to expand the species, and that goal serves the U.S. taxpayer, those are words that Congress could use.
The tag line from my book says this succinctly. “We go to Mars to take our civilization there, we go to the Moon to help save our civilization here”.
In case you have not been paying attention in 38 years we will have over 9 billion people living on this planet. It is the consensus of those who study such things that this number of people will stretch the resources of this planet, maybe to the breaking point. Thus from the studies that we already have, we understand that the resources of just the inner solar system are thousands of times more plentiful than what is easily accessible on the earth in order to provide a prosperous 21st century style standard of living for all humans on the Earth. With this being understood, it is a legitimate point to bring into the context of such a human spaceflight analysis, how such a program might actually benefit humans on the Earth.
As per the comment below …
The tag line from my book says this succinctly. “We go to Mars to take
our civilization there, we go to the Moon to help save our civilization
here.
That may be the consensus of people who study such things, but it is NOT the consensus of the people who fund U.S. human space flight. You may have these words in your book, but you won’t find them in any legislation, report language, or White House budget proposal.
Human space flight advocates should give themselves a shake and understand that what is sensible to a random collection of self-styled space experts and human space flight jocks is not necessarily the common sense of Congress, the Administration, or the general taxpayer.
As you note, if this astute, independent committee can cogently argue, for example, that a primary purpose of human space flight is to save the species, perhaps even better for the nation than it is for the species, and that this message is one that the U.S. taxpayer can really buy into, that would be a HUGE policy win for human space flight.
That may be the consensus of people who study such things, but it is NOT the consensus of the people who fund U.S. human space flight. You may have these words in your book, but you won’t find them in any legislation, report language, or White House budget proposal.
Helen
We have been down this road before, you are simply wrong in that position.
From the Marburger Goddard Symposium speech 2006.
As I see it, questions about the vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not. Our national policy, declared by President Bush and endorsed by Congress last December in the NASA authorization act, affirms that, “The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.” So at least for now the question has been decided in the affirmative.
http://www.nss.org/resource…
It was a diminution of the Bush VSE that took us off track into an argument about a stupid heavy lift launch vehicle as the means whereby to get us off the planet.
Marburger’s entire speech, which was in 2006 AFTER Griffin’s ascension to the NASA administrator position, was that funding for space has to be measured against larger societal goals. This is an entirely appropriate position to take and to limit human spaceflight to science projects is to make it an unneeded appendage in a time of a record national debt.
In two days we are going to have an election. If Governor Romney gets elected he has stated his criterion for the value of a government program.
“Each expenditure will be weighed against the criterion that ‘is it important enough to borrow money from China to fund it'”
Whatever you think of Romney, or Obama for that matter, this criterion is going to be a growing factor in government funding decisions as we go forward. Without tying it to greater societal needs and goals, it is simply not going to be funded. Marburger and the Bush administration proved this in that after this speech NASA took a funding hit in comparison to the NSF, the department of education (who’s budget was increased from $28 billion in FY 2001 to over $63 billion by the end of the Bush administration).
Could you imagine what we could accomplish in space if NASA had that kind of budget increase? Do you? It is NEVER going to happen without this tie to larger societal needs.
You can argue all you want but this is a simple fact of life in our political system.
Spending will more and more be tied to return on investment and immediate productivity gains. It would be nice to have spending is going to dry up.
Spaceflight, like every other form of transportation, is about two things; moving brain cells from point A to point B or moving goods and resources from point A to point B.
Going to point B has to have a National return on investment or productivity gain equal to or greater than competing funding requests.
Nothing would create demand for capital flows to and from a potential point B, like that 9 billion unclaimed asset called Luna, then a property rights regime for Earth’s lone natural satellite.
Our national policy, declared by President Bush and endorsed by Congress last December in the NASA authorization act, affirms that, “The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific,
security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration
program.Sorry, but it’s a bit of an extrapolation to identically associate those words with human space flight. It would be useful if the Human Spaceflight Committee would do so. We do a lot of space exploration without astronauts. A robust program of kite flying doesn’t require sending humans up in kites. As to the last authorization legislation, that wasn’t last December. P.L. 111–267 was signed Oct. 11, 2010. In it, “The long term goal of the human space flight and exploration efforts of NASA shall be to expand permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit and to do so, where practical, in a manner involving international partners.” Species protection was never cited as an objective there. Just read it. Look, I think you’re just preaching to the choir. The job that needs to be done is to preach to the taxpayer, and it’s going to take people who can look somewhat dispassionately and independently at human space flight to do that. That’s what this committee could help do. It’s interesting that the grousing I’m hearing about this committee sounds a little fearful. NRC studies are pretty cheap, on the grand scale of space accomplishment. If you think it’s going to fail, then just feel free to ignore it and let it do so. Go up to the Hill and tell Congress why they shouldn’t have asked for it.
Sorry, but it’s a bit of an extrapolation to identically associate those words with human space flight.
The limitations of this forum preclude providing all of the examples of this but there is a clear evolution of this thought process as well as a devolution of it in government.
ALL science and science fiction regarding the development of space up to and through the Apollo program (read the congressional registers from 1962-1968) emphasized this as a new field where we would not only explore but would develop the final frontier.
I have been delving deeply into the Nasa technical resorts server regarding some amazing commercial space market developments that were done in the 1970’s through the early 80’s.
Even in the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), this self sufficiency and ability to use local resources was part of the plan.
George Bush in his VSE speech brought out the benefits of lunar oxygen for propellant and possibly even spacecraft build on the Moon as important for Mars.
Your thought process here simply does not reflect the historical development of this paradigm. The problem has been at the implementation level in NASA. Those who have advocated this for decades (and I know almost all of them) have been pushed aside by this almost monomaniacal focus on rebuilding a launch vehicle infrastructure that its original designer (Von Braun) knew was a one off expediency to win the race to the Moon and not the basis for a sustainable space program. Read the Horizon report that is now declassified. That was what Von Braun wanted, which was merely an update of the Bonestell images and the Von Braun writings of the 1950’s.
Helen,
It would be a lot easier discussing things with you if you would actually learn to read what’s written instead of putting invented words into other people’s mouths.
You, all by yourself, made the sole statement about ISRU needing HSF; nobody else suggested that at all. However, when I point out the converse, that HSF is going to need ISRU at some point (the opposite of what you invented out of thin air) you call me crazy and start with the sarcastic, meaningless analogies.
Quite aside from what this committee is for, you dismissed ISRU out of hand based on nothing that was actually said by anyone (but you).
I stand by my opinion that HSF is going to need ISRU at some point, and if you can’t see why that’s true, then I respectfully suggest you give it some more thought. I’m not going to attempt to explain it to you, since I’m just a crazy person.
Here’s a news flash for you — Helen Simpson is not the all-knowing authority that she appears to think she is. She can’t read properly, and her people skills need serious work.
Have a nice day.
Steve
Helen
The public and people today don’t believe in a future in space because it is not affordable. Our recent Space policy as all but killed the dream
It is a no brainer that we will need robots and or humans to go into space to get resources in the near future. So my simple point is that through something as simple and as silly as Tshirt ads, we can spread the word and create support one person at a time. Let them have their meetings. Soon Spacex will recover a booster and the revolution in space flight, human space flight will be on.
My last 2 weeks have been spent with Iron workers building a large volume for industry here on earth. These types of men/people would love to be building a space station/city in space.
The dream
Helen
Thank you, you are correct. There are so many of these useless committees that one gets them confused.
As is pertains to ISRU and human spaceflight, it has been the history of humans, wherever they go, that they must utilize local resources in order to survive. Just in the history of Arctic exploration those efforts that did not use local resources (mostly British) failed, while those that hunted, fished, and use local food sources (Norwegian) succeeded masterfully.
It will be no different in space.
Dennis,
In your post I think you have inadvertently shown the real reason why this committee and report will be no more of an accomplishment than any of its predecessors. Even though you are an open-minded person, willing to listen to the other party’s viewpoint and give it some thought before responding, you, like most of us would I suspect, did two things in your post — 1) you made a decision about what’s important and should be included, and 2) you have already decided what the outcome will (or will not) be worth, all before the process has begun.
I have no reason to believe that the worthy people assigned to this committee, despite their lofty credentials and years of experience, will be any different from those who came before, and most if not all of us. I would be willing to bet that, with the best of intentions, the committee members will all sit down on day one each with his/her mind already made up on certain questions/issues of importance to themselves, or their associates, and an unwillingness to back down on any of their “goals.”
Being only slightly cynical, I’ll suggest that if you asked each committee member on day one for a list of their “goals” and then built a composite list which included everybody’s goals, that list (plus all of the pretty buzz words and boilerplate prose) will read not very different from the report that this committee will eventually publish. If we were to accept that idea as essentially accurate, then it all comes down to who is selected to be on the committee. So, the net result will be many months and lots of money spent to compile a pretty much useless list that could have all been done by phone within a couple of days. And I seriously contend that this is only a slight exaggeration.
In this situation, I would say that all of the clichés and bad jokes about committees are warranted.
Personally, the issue that most disturbs me about this whole thing is that this report is to “advise Congress on NASA’s human space flight activities,” which may have been shoehorned into the Authorization act, but it flies in the face of the NASA Charter, which I see as further insult to both NASA and the Presidency from Congress. How much longer can Congress continue to abuse and tear down long-standing institutions and legalities before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down completely? I find it scary and genuinely puzzling that Americans don’t seem to take notice that their Congressional elected representatives play by their own rules.
Steve
1) you made a decision about what’s important and should be included, and 2) you have already decided what the outcome will (or will not) be worth, all before the process has begun.
If you look at the world around us you will see that humans have two fundamental problems in regards to sustaining and extending a prosperous standard of living to all humans on the planet. The first is energy, and the second are resources. We know from the scientific and human exploration missions of the past and today that the resources of the solar system are far greater than the resources easily accessible to humans here on the Earth. Thus it is a reasonable question to place before such entities whether or not a program of exploration and development of these resources is in our common interest.
For the last 40 years we have pissed around with arguments like “inspiration”, “science”, and “expanding the human spirit”. NONE OF THESE OTHER REASONS HAS RESULTED IN ANY SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS.
Thus it stands to reason that we must look for other justifications, and to tie these justifications to the larger concerns of our planetary population.
That will not work either; it is even farther from the concerns of the average voter. The taxpayers will never spend even $100B to build a small moon colony.
If we _ever_ want to see any more than six people in space at once, we need to reduce the cost of human spaceflight to a level at which a large number of tourists and scientists can actually afford to buy seats to orbit. This will require a maximum cost per seat to orbit of <$1M. This cannot be achieved by any “economies of scale” with obsolete throwaway launch vehicles and spacecraft. But it doesn’t require magical warp drives either. The only thing you need to refly a properly designed Space Shuttle is fuel, and all the all the fuel that put even something the size of the Shuttle in orbit costs virtually nothing (assuming we use liquid propellants).
It’s time to be realistic. We cannot increase the intrinsic value of human spaceflight. If we want it to continue as anything more than an occasional stunt for billionaires, we must instead reduce the cost.
I come at it in a little bit different approach. If you look at all economic booms, they are started when a company starts making just insane profits. Extra normal profits. Capital automatically flows towards these profits.
This always leads to over production and the shakeout. Prices are slashed as firms compete for customers and unproductive companies fall to the wayside and go bankrupt and the winners buy up that production capability.
Provide the incentives, like zero g – zero tax, that begins the capital flows towards the higher returns until that eureka moment … or netscape moment if you will, happens and the capital floodgates open so that any company with space in their names is swamped with capital.
I often times think people want to skip some steps in the natural evolutionary process of products and markets when it comes to space.
We talk about cheap lift, America is still in the absolute cradle when it comes to space infrastructure and I am not refering to things like orbital space stations or moon bases.
We have still never even produced rockets at a 1930’s – 40’s industrial level. Factories churning out interchanglable engines along with every other part. Not 12 engines a year .. 12,000 engines a year. We can have seriously cheaper disposable lift if it was produced in serious numbers and where a bad launch just gets scraped off the pad and another goes up. Can you imagine if a Nation’s commercial transportation sector GROUND TO A TOTAL HALT if there was a single car accident like the shuttle?
If there were a dozen firms competing the evolution to fully reusable would be more natural then trying to artifically force it into existance.
Personally I believe we have a long way to go with what we have before we have to really worry about holy grails in spending all the development money on it.
No one has ever built a large, manned
aerospace vehicle at a cost that would make it practical to mass produce it and use each vehicle only
once. Commercial aircraft have been in production for over a century and are still about the same price as space launch vehicles of comparable size. Cost-saving opportunities exist in aerospace manufacturing but many operations cannot be fully automated and even the raw materials are expensive. Moreover, increasing demand for launch services will raise cost rather than lower it, as any Econ 101 text explains, simply because manufacturers will be able to demand a higher price.
Reusability is at least possible. The only solution is to use taxpayer dollars primarily to develop new technology that will lower launch cost for commercial human spaceflight.
Dennis,
I’m not arguing against your reasoning at all. I fully agree on almost every point. The point that I was attempting to make is that this committee will fail to accomplish anything useful, for the same reason as all of those which came before — because even the best people involved go into such an exercise with their opinions already fixed and their minds already made up, so nothing new comes out of them, just the same old party lines and platitudes. I suspect that even the well-received Augustine reports could have just about have been written on day one.
Steve
Helen
Started to read your post
Did you know spacex is selling cool looking Tshirts?
I’m going to buy some so when I walk around, people will ask me about Spacex and I can tell them how they re leading the way to affordable human space flight 🙂
Why don’t you buy some as Christmas gifts 🙂
Sorry to interrupt
Carry on
Joe Q. Public
I don’t understand where the 2 years 4 months comes from. Nov 2012 to May 2014 is 18 months. 2 years and 1 month to go from legislation to setup and that makes the 3 years and 7 months.
Does the committee get to consider things from after the legislation, or is it locked in to discussing the materials listed in the legislation itself?
Clearly we need more committees in space policy.
We need “The Space Leadership Preservation Act of 2012” because I do not think our leaders at NASA know what they are doing. They need more direction and more oversight. This committee will only help to steer the direction of our nation’s space policy which has been adrift.
A committee like this can only help. We need to bring in more people who can articulate what our space policy should be. We need an open discussion on why NASA can’t get things done.
I hope that this committee then reports to OSTP and the Congress so that we can then hold more hearings in the House Subcommittee and Space and Aeronautics, where, after careful deliberation, we can then refer the information to the full committee.
Meanwhile, in the senate, Senator Nelson should also hold a hearing in his subcommittee committee as well. Because, we do not have enough oversight and the authorizers know what to do once they get the information.
And like I said before, NASA doesn’t know what it is doing, so we need more people, and more committees making sure NASA is doing what it is supposed to.
At the same time both the House and Senate should hold additional meetings in their respective Appropriations subcommittees. There again, we can “drill down” to the root causes of the problems that plague NASA. We simply cannot afford NOT to have this valuable insight.
And just like before, after the appropriate subcommittees meet and discuss the findings of the committees above, they should then put forward their findings to the full appropriations committees of their respective bodies.
Receiving the reports from their respective subcommittees we can then move to full floor votes in both the House and Senate where we can add amendments to make sure our committees have correctly worded the bills that have made it through the subcommittees and committees.
And of course, once the House and Senate pass their bills we must send it to conference where yet another committee will be able to come to some joint resolution of the two bills before being sent to the President for his signature.
I think we need another committee.
Andrew,
You’ve outlined a substantial set of plans for all of these committees. But don’t you think you’ve left out a few committees? What about the committees that need to audit all of the committees you’ve listed? And don’t forget the committees that would be necessary oversight committees to those committees.