SpaceX just launched NASA's first mission numbered "13" in more than 50 years.
Crew-13, the 13th flight of the company's Crew Dragon capsule flying under the agency's commercial crew contract, lifted off at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) on Thursday (Oct. 1) from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Commander Jessica Watkins and pilot Luke Delaney of NASA, mission specialist Joshua Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency and mission specialist Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos are on their way to a rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station, beginning their planned five-and-a-half-month expedition.
Their time on the orbiting outpost will begin with a brief handover period with the outgoing Crew-12 astronauts, as would be expected for anyone familiar with the normal procession of numbers. But that was not always the case throughout NASA's history.
Triskaidekaphobia
NASA's first human space program to reach a 13th numbered flight was Apollo. The April 1970 mission was planned to be the third time U.S. astronauts landed on the moon, but as now is famously known, Apollo 13 was derailed by an inflight explosion that made the flight's primary goal returning Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Dick Gordon safely to Earth.
Both before and after the flight, the crew had little concern about their mission being numbered 13. They were aware of the superstition — that "13" was an unlucky number — but if they paid any attention to it, it was to make a joke.
"I never thought of it in a superstitious sense, that we would have a problem on 13," said Haise, the mission's lunar module pilot, in a 50th anniversary interview with collectSPACE.com in 2020. "I had no sense at all, nor do I relate to the launch time [13:13 CST] and all the other thirteens that people have tried to tie to things as being connected with the flight."
Jim Beggs reportedly felt differently. The NASA administrator when the agency reached its next 13th numbered mission in 1984, Beggs was against tempting fate.
"'There's not going to be [another] Apollo 13 or a Shuttle 13," he said, according to Bob Crippen, commander of the space shuttle's STS-41C mission, in a NASA oral history interview.
Giving in to triskaidekaphobia — the fear of the number 13 — Beggs ordered NASA to adopt a new but convoluted numbering system for all shuttle missions after STS-9.
"Hence, what would have been STS-13 became STS-41-C, where the '4' was the fiscal year [1984], the '1' was the launch site [Kennedy Space Center in Florida] and 'C' the order of launch [C was the third planned flight of the year]," said Crippen.
Beggs left office after the Challenger tragedy in 1986 and with him went the complex number and letter system. The first mission to return the space shuttle to flight — the 26th in the program's history — was designated STS-26.
It comes after 12
Before SpaceX's Crew-13, the closest NASA had come to having to consider the question was Expedition 13, the 13th crew to take up residency on the ISS. It was not, however, a solely American crew, with only a NASA astronaut, a Russian commander and German flight engineer aboard.
Other missions were not strictly the 13th, such as STS-113, which flew to the International Space Station in 2002, or were not American and so were not NASA's to decide. Russia's Soyuz TMA-13M and Soyuz MS-13 flew without so much as a black cat getting in their way.
"We were joking a lot about being number 113," Ken Bowersox, STS-113 commander, told the press at the time. To play it safe, though, the crew's mission patch used the Roman numerals (CXIII) instead.
As for Crew-13 astronauts, they seem be unfazed by reintroducing "13" to the order of U.S. missions, going so far as to style their official crew insignia after the emblem worn by the Apollo 13 astronauts.
"We took a lot of inspiration from the Apollo 13 crew as Crew-13," said Watkins, answering a question from the press gathered for their pre-launch arrival at the Kennedy Space Center. "We have a couple of nods in terms of just the Roman numerals, the golden color [and] the dragon looking upward."
"We really wanted to honor their legacy, honor their resilience and their grit and bring a little bit of that with us on our crew," she said. "We stand on the shoulders of giants."
