An age of innocence

Abstract

Thirteen has for hundreds of years been regarded by many cultures as an unlucky number. One person who apparently did believe strongly in ‘triskaidekaphobia’- an irrational fear of the number thirteen - was NASA Administrator Jim Beggs and it was from the agency’s Washington headquarters that an edict came, sometime in the early summer of 1983, announcing a change to the Shuttle numbering system to avoid STS-13. Instead of straightforward numbers, missions would be assigned a cryptic and somewhat clumsy alphanumeric combination, which astronaut Vance Brand described as “a neat new way of designating missions … that confused everyone!” Firstly, there was the system itself. Brand’s mission came to be known as ‘STS-41B’.