Technology and Scienceupdated 1h ago2 min read
Margaret Hamilton Dies At 90, Led NASA Apollo Software Team
Led MIT Instrumentation Lab team that created onboard Apollo flight software. Software helped Apollo 11 land; descent succeeded during overload alarms.
Apollo software pioneer dies
Margaret Hamilton, who led a software team for NASA's Apollo program, died at 90, and her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, told The Associated Press that Hamilton died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that her work helped make humanity’s first journeys to the moon possible, and MIT News quoted Olivier de Weck saying, “She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy.”
MIT said Hamilton died on 30 September and described her as a “computing pioneer,” while BBC reported that she led the team who developed the software for NASA's Apollo missions that coined the term “software engineering.”
Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, and BBC said she led a team of engineers writing and testing all onboard in-flight software for NASA's Apollo 11 project that guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon.
Code that handled alarms
In 1969, an onboard computer raised an alarm moments before the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and BBC said the error detected the computer was overloaded and for a moment it looked like the complex landing might not be achieved. Hamilton and her team had planned for such an error by engineering “priority-driven software” to shut down any background tasks and favour the most important, according to MIT as quoted by BBC.
CBS News said Hamilton told CBS Boston in 2019, “All of a sudden the priority alarms came on, 1201 and 1202,” and it said her code helped the computer solve the problem and avoid an emergency abort. The BBC account also said the onboard software engineering was immortalised in a 1969 photograph of Hamilton standing beside the stack of printed code that towered beside her, and it added that Obama honored her in 2016 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Legacy, awards, and influence
MIT said Hamilton taught at the university from 1959 to the mid-1970s and called her a “computing pioneer,” while Ars Technica said she coined the term “software engineering” and led the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s. Ars Technica said Hamilton was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and it quoted Olivier de Weck describing her as “ahead of her time” and a leader who developed advanced code and led a team using “that nascent technology.”
“A Lego set celebrating the women of NASA that was unveiled in 2017 included a figure of Hamilton.”
BBC said Hamilton was born in Indiana in 1936 and first studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before moving to Earlham College where she got a BA in mathematics in 1958, and it said she then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, a year later with her husband. MIT News also said Hamilton worked at the Instrumentation Lab into the 1970s and later founded two software companies, and ABC News said she was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology, including through a Lego set unveiled in 2017 that included a figure of Hamilton.