SpaceX launched Crew-13 toward the International Space Station, marking the first time a United States astronaut mission has embraced the number 13 since the Apollo era. The flight departed from Cape Canaveral, carrying a four-person international crew that openly drew inspiration from the resilience of Apollo 13.
When a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, it carried more than just a fresh rotation of researchers into orbit under the agency’s commercial crew contract. The flight, designated Crew-13, ended a more than fifty-year operational taboo within the American space program. For over five decades, NASA systematically avoided assigning the number 13 to its crewed flights, a practice born from the dramatic near-disaster of the 1970 lunar mission.
The capsule rose into the Florida sky at 11:10 a.m. EDT (15:10 GMT) on Thursday, October 1, 2026. Aboard the spacecraft were NASA commander Jessica Watkins and pilot Luke Delaney, alongside mission specialist Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and mission specialist Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos representing international cooperation on the orbiting outpost. The team is scheduled to spend five and a half months aboard the laboratory complex, beginning their mission with a handover period alongside the outgoing Crew-12 astronauts.
How Apollo 13 Superstitions Shaped NASA Administration
The negative association with the number 13 took root across American popular culture as triscaidekaphobia—the fear of an unlucky number—and eventually bled into official administrative decisions. While the crew of the original 1970 lunar flight viewed superstitions with amusement, the technical crisis that crippled their spacecraft left an indelible mark on institutional memory.
Despite the crew’s pragmatic approach, subsequent leadership reacted strongly to the association. When the space shuttle program reached its next thirteenth flight in 1984, then-NASA administrator Jim Beggs refused to use the designation. Bob Crippen, commander of the mission STS-41C, recalled the administrator’s firm stance in a NASA oral history interview.
To bypass the figure, the agency adopted a convoluted coding structure. A flight that should have been designated STS-13 was re-designated as STS-41-C, where the digit four indicated the fiscal year, the one represented the Kennedy Space Center launch site, and the trailing letter marked the order of launch as the third planned flight of that period. This complex nomenclature dissolved after the Challenger accident in 1986 when Beggs left office. The agency accepted the number without changes for the Crew-13 mission, in contrast to what happened following the accident of the Apollo 13 flight that transformed the figure into a reminder of risk, chance, and technical capacity to survive an extreme crisis.
Design of the Crew-13 Expedition Insignia
Rather than avoiding the numerical milestone, the modern flight team leaned directly into it. The four astronauts designed their official mission patch as a deliberate homage to the emblem worn by the 1970 lunar crew, incorporating gold tones, Roman numerals, and a soaring dragon. The insignia of Crew-13 incorporated Roman numerals, golden tones, and an upward dragon as a tribute to the resilience of Apollo 13.
The approach reframes a historical crisis not as a warning, but as human persistence.
The commander added that the team wanted to honor the grit of their predecessors while carrying that legacy forward into commercial space operations. The crew remains aboard the orbiting laboratory to manage ongoing scientific investigations and complex station maintenance tasks.