Astronauts Prepare With 'Lucky' Launch Day Rituals

Unless you pose with the cake, play cards and slap the sticker you don't launch.

ByABC News
January 8, 2009, 1:22 AM

Oct. 23, 2007 — -- As NASA geared up for this morning's launch of Discovery to the International Space Station, fueling up and weather concerns weren't the only things on the astronauts' minds.

No space shuttle mission launches without following some important time-honored rituals that include cakes, playing cards and mission stickers. Forget the four-leaf clover and a lucky rabbit's foot. Shuttle crews have their own good luck charms.

NASA Cmdr. Pam Melroy says the astronauts won't leave for the launch pad until they are done playing cards.

"There is a ritual card game that has to be played after everyone suits up, and you cannot walk out the door until the commander loses," Melroy told ABC News.

Is she tempted to throw the game? Melroy says absolutely not.

"That would violate the whole principle. And if everybody is waiting and watching the clock, so be it."

Anchovies became the good luck symbol for her flight on STS 92 in October 2000.

"We [delayed the launch] for weather, for a pin in the wrong place, and so forth. We had a crew that was very close, and we liked to eat out together, and there were a couple of people who really hated fish, and there were also several people who liked fish, so we had a pizza for lunch every day," she said. "And we had some pieces with anchovies and some without, and so the last holdout had to eat anchovies, and we did in fact launch the next day."

Then there is the cake.

Pilot George Zamka says a beautiful cake appears before every launch and the crew always poses for a photo with the cake. But the cake goes untouched.

"It is a very nice cake, but we don't get to eat it," Zamka said. "We just look at it and celebrate with it, but we don't get to eat it. I think they store them in a room somewhere, so somewhere there is 30-plus years of cake."

Another ritual is observed when the crew leaves the astronaut quarters to get into the van that takes it to the launch pad.

The doorway of the quarters is decorated with stickers from every previous mission. Zamka says that if an astronaut has flown on a previous mission, he or she has to find that sticker.