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’.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Evans, B. (2012). An age of innocence. In: Tragedy and Triumph in Orbit. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3430-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3430-6_3
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