L'Affaire Siloxane

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane

by idlewords • 1 month ago

299 54 1 month ago

mceglowski.substack.com

s0rce6• 1 month ago

Siloxanes contaminate everything. We routinely see them on various surfaces when doing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

isoprophlex• 1 month ago

Indeed. "Grease peaks" we called them, they were always there in basically all NMR or MS spectra I took as an organic chemist. Like PFAS or microplastics, you just can't get rid of them.

mrob• 1 month ago

You can see this grease by the effect it has on water contact angle. If you have a smooth glass/metal/ceramic surface, cleaned by a highly effective method (e.g. an ultrasonic cleaner), water poured on it will slide off easily without forming beads ("water-break test"). But if you leave it out in ordinary air for some time, the water will form beads again even if you never touch it. Exact time varies depending on air quality, but probably within a few hours.

cubefox2• 1 month ago

I bet some of these modern environmental contaminants is causing the increasing age cohort cancer rates.

ericd2• 1 month ago

Apparently we also put polydimethylsiloxane in deep frying oil. Wonder what that does to our innards.

s0rce6• 1 month ago

For antifoaming?

RobotToaster2• 1 month ago

while a further 7,000 kilograms of treated urine were sitting in orbital storage tanks, waiting to be processed.

Is that a record for the biggest piss bottle ever made?

mannykannot2• 1 month ago

A two meter cubed volume would be sufficient to hold that much. I would guess that cruise ships store more urine than that, though presumably not separated from everything else humans dump into toilets.

With the qualification 'in orbit', I imagine it is.

lugoues• 1 month ago

I thought they just dumped it overboard but maybe there are some ethical cruises... maybe.

sprinkly-dust• 1 month ago

I hope to see these seemingly mundane unknown unknowns raised in space travel centered hard science fiction. I think The Martian and Seveneves almost captured these but not quite.

tedd4u• 1 month ago

Project Hail Mary has a devilish contamination subplot.

RobotToaster2• 1 month ago

I'm sceptical of the claim that they couldn't eliminate the majority of them from stuff that's shipped up to the ISS. Even if it meant making special space certified hair conditioner.

s0rce6• 1 month ago

I don't see why not either, just get "organic"/plant or mineral based cosmetics, deodorants and hair products.

Centigonal• 1 month ago

It's really, really complicated. Even "organic" or "all natural" products often contain synthetic contaminants as a result of manufacturing, packaging, or shipping processes. Unless NASA were to set up separate factories and supply chains for manufacturing all known sources of siloxane contamination (either on their own or in partnership with manufacturers), it would be very difficult to actually get a siloxane-free product with any kind of certainty or consistency.

An example with a different contaminant: We can't seem to keep carcinogenic plasticizers out of our RXBars and our baby formula[1]. Those products are already way more regulated than something like wet wipes, and the companies that make them have a strong interest in keeping them free of contamination.

[1] https://www.plasticlist.org/

idlewords2• 1 month ago

There's a nice paper on this, ICES-2018-123 "Dimethylsilanediol (DMSD) Source Assessment and Mitigation on ISS: Estimated Contributions from Personal Hygiene Products Containing Volatile Methyl Siloxanes (VMS)". The upshot is more than half of the siloxane burden on ISS comes from God knows where (packaging, plastics, machinery, you name it).

https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/items/ff1a240e-1fb1-4b04-acb2-42e9c45...

LeifCarrotson• 1 month ago

From the paper:

The main sources of VMS were determined to be antiperspirants ... skin lotions ... wipes ... and hair conditioner. Several siloxanes-free options are available for [these products]. These products are now being assessed for crew member use in future increments.

From the blog:

At present the agency is testing a new filtration system to put in front of the heat exchangers, to try to protect them, and continuing to try to cut down on siloxanes at the source level. There are probably people at NASA now whose entire career has been built on siloxane control.

Why wasn't the result to simply ban siloxane-containing cosmetics and wipes? The cosmetics are up to the individual astronaut, which is a little crazy, but the wipes are provided by NASA, and they're still using siloxane-bearing wipes, which shortens the life of their water systems and costs crazy amounts of money.

RetroTechie• 1 month ago

Got it. Time to introduce a "certified siloxane free" programme for the space station building & supply industry.

Just joking here, but reading between the lines it might not be such a bad idea? (if doable)

adolph2• 1 month ago

An interesting substory that is simultaneously reminiscent of the Fogbank story and how Hayek's "curious task" is much more broadly applicable:

  There is a good cautionary tale here from the Space Shuttle era. That vehicle 
  had heat resistant tiles that had to be attached to the aluminum belly of the 
  orbiter. A special cloth had been certified for wiping the aluminum clean 
  before applying the primer that securely bonded the tiles to the metal. After 
  years of uneventful use, tile engineers discovered that new replacement tiles 
  were no longer curing properly.
  
  A careful investigation revealed that the supplier of that special cloth had 
  changed the lubricant used in the machine that sews its hem. Minute amounts 
  of the lubricant were being deposited on the stitching, and enough of that 
  residue was getting on the aluminum skin to prevent the tile adhesive from 
  curing properly.

s0rce6• 1 month ago

In medical device manufacturing you have systems in place that your vendors have to disclose changes to their manufacturing process that hopefully can catch stuff like this before people die. I can see how minute stuff gets easily passed off as not an important change.

duskwuff• 1 month ago

Especially if the real change is a couple levels separated from the problem. For instance, I can imagine a situation where the manufacturer of that "special cloth" didn't even change anything themselves, but their lubricant supplier silently changed the formula of their sewing machine oil. (Or maybe even that one of the suppliers to the lubricant company changed something - it's turtles all the way down.)

pjc50• 1 month ago

The "curious task" full reference from Hayek:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Intended as a warning against command economies and centralized structures more generally, because the information-processing requirements are much larger than one might expect. But of course there are few things more central-planning than a space programme.

adolph2• 1 month ago

In this case a broader reading is an exhortation to guard against intellectual hubris. Through its various trials NASA seems like a good organization for learning from error and not accepting easy answers (except when they have to terrible results), and in this siloxane story I'm glad to see evidence of institutional curiosity that I could not have drempt up.

shmeeed2• 1 month ago

Part of my job is to keep siloxanes out of a complex, multi-step, multi-sub-contracted manufacturing process. A supplier change that should have been a simple affair has cost us several kilobucks in analyses in the past months. I hate the stuff.

wingmanjd• 1 month ago

This is the first time hearing the term "kilobucks". I love it (and am stealing it for future conversations).

goodmythical• 1 month ago

I wish megabucks and gigabucks had the same ring...

liotier2• 1 month ago

In French project management parlance, we use k€ all the time.

ggm2• 1 month ago

I feel the microplastics contamination story which turns out to be measuring nitrile gloves used preparing samples is in this space. We can now measure things down to levels that may exceed our ability to exclude them as contaminants, routinely.

mananaysiempre• 1 month ago

I’d say that has been true since we started using spectrometers (of all kinds). Those things are preposterously sensitive and pretty damn routine. Nowadays of course there are also other, more narrowly scoped detection methods as well, such as PCR.

ggm2• 1 month ago

PCR/amplification is black magic. I'm also amazed by "no the DNA will be too old" keeps turning out not to be entirely true: People getting out of jail from re-testing evidence 20+ years later, Hominid DNA statements being made from archaic bones..

Animal population studies used to be (in my understanding) largely observational. Now, people can do scat tests and identify individuals.

golem14• 1 month ago

There is an even more fantastic incident with Ritonavir (Norvir), where the manufacturer lost the ability to make a retroviral drug for an extended time.

Something like that during a covid like moment would suck donkey rocks.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4479028/

voidUpdate• 1 month ago

I am mildly concerned about the "normalised deviance" of the siloxanes in the water. It's probably an acceptable amount and it's probably fine, but "eh, its only a bit worse than expected, what's the worst that could happen" is what lost 2 space shuttles

ben_w• 1 month ago

While this is all new to me, surprises like this are a big part of why I now think we should aim for the Moon first, and only consider Mars when the moon bases are nice and boring.

If there was any "we don't even know if this is an emergency" surprise interaction along these lines, a 3-day emergency resupply mission (or evacuation) is much, much easier than a 6-9 month trip when the planets align.

krunck• 1 month ago

No mention was made of eliminating the siloxane use by astronauts: leave-in hair conditioner, deodorant, etc.

I wonder if they track PFAS/PFOS contamination also?

L'Affaire Siloxane

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