It is well-known, especially after the film came out, that NASA engineers and staff were consciously tempting fate when they scheduled the Apollo 13 launch for 13 minutes after the hour. Of course, up until that point in history, it was customary to omit the 13th floor in buildings and to omit the 1300 block in city street planning, among other things. So it was a rather "progressive" move for NASA to even suggest that they not skip directly from Apollo 12 to Apollo 14.
I do not rightly recall, but I believe that the film portrayed other ways they poked fun at superstition in a really callous and cavalier manner. So is it any surprise that they were rewarded with a disastrous and life-threatening mission? Hmm.
We know what caused the Apollo 13 incident and it had nothing to do with the number or date time of launch. A wire shorted and caused a fire. We learned not to use teflon inside oxygen tanks.
Letting superstition impact decision making of a billion dollar project would be criminal incompetence.
It makes you wonder if there is some cause-and-effect here. Being cavalier about the number 13, which could have been either stressful or performative for at least some people, could have affected the way they approach other work.
What I mean is, if you start saying "what could go wrong?" to numerology, maybe you start saying it about other things.
I'm not saying that I think anyone did anything wrong. But psychology is weird sometimes, and unintended consequences abound...
In my experience real problems from both are not about the specific day or date or numerology, but about the psychology behind the choice - which inevitably causes problems.
With Friday pushes, someone is inevitably in a rush to get something out despite the risks and ignoring that most folks are going to be checked out and unavailable regardless of what they say (because most people are working M-F). Which is a recipe for disaster. If the company has a shifted schedule or something going on, the same danger could apply on a Monday, but Friday’s are a problem 99% of the time.
With something like ‘the 13th’, it could be someone intentionally picking things that have no obvious rational reason to be a problem but that make some people uneasy and worried for non-rational reasons.
While most of the time that isn’t a problem, sometimes there actually is a problem there, we just haven’t been able to figure it out rationally yet, let alone provide a useful counter measure. And people feeling uneasy, even if they aren’t rationally aware of it causes problems on its own. We tend to go where our mind visualizes we will end up.
After all, it is generally a bad idea to be walking under ladders or scaffolding without a hard hat for instance, and broken mirrors are dangerous. Just not for 7 years, assuming one has a vacuum and cleans it up well enough after.
And if people are uneasy about something, why intentionally aim for it? Why not avoid it? Or at least just ignore it.
Assuming there isn’t some huge pressing benefit to doing the thing that is making people uneasy anyway, which I’m struggling to imagine why it would be important to hit all the numerology ‘bad numbers’ in Apollo’s case for instance.
