Margaret Hamilton, lead Apollo software developer, dies aged 90

Mixed · 2The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced on Wednesday 7 October that Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist whose software powered the first Moon landing, has died aged 90. 1 2 Mixed · 2MIT said she died on 30 September. 1 2 Mixed · 2Born in Indiana in 1936, Hamilton studied mathematics and moved to Boston in 1959 with her husband. She worked in meteorology at MIT, learning to program and writing software to detect enemy aircraft, before joining a lab in 1965 that sought people to develop software to "send a man to the Moon". 2 1

Mixed · 2MIT said she was hired as the first programmer for the Apollo project at MIT and the first female programmer on it; by 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, with more than 400 people working on Apollo's software. 2 1 Centre · 1BBC News reported that she worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, managing its Software Engineering Division, where her team wrote and tested all the onboard flight software for Apollo 11, which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon. 3 Left · 1In 1969, minutes before Apollo 11 was due to land, an onboard computer alarm sounded; the crew continued, and Hamilton later said the software had detected a hardware-related problem and compensated by restarting and re-establishing the highest-priority tasks. 1

Centre · 1MIT said her team had planned for such an overload with "priority-driven software" that shut down background tasks in favour of the landing. 3 Mixed · 2Barack Obama referred to that episode when he gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, saying: "Our astronauts didn’t have much time, but thankfully they had Margaret Hamilton." 1 2 Right · 1Olivier de Weck, the Apollo programme professor and interim head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said describing her as a pioneer would be "a dramatic understatement". NASA chief Jared Isaacman called her "a pioneer whose work helped make Apollo and humanity’s first journeys to the moon possible". 2

Mixed · 2Draper Laboratory chief executive Jerry M Wohletz said she made an "indelible mark" on the firm, which spun out of MIT's Instrumentation Lab after Apollo 11, though she did not join it. Earlham College, where she earned a mathematics degree in 1958, said her legacy would inspire "generations of Earlhamites". 4 3 Right · 1Isaacman said the best way to honour her was to continue exploring space; GB News also reported that NASA gave her its Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003, that she became a Lego minifigure in 2017, and that she was credited with popularising the term "software engineering". 4 Mixed · 2She later published more than 130 papers and founded the software companies Higher Order Software and Hamilton Technologies. She is survived by a daughter, a son-in-law, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren, according to MIT. 2 1

Right · 1GB News named her survivors as her daughter Lauren Hamilton and son-in-law Richard Selesnick, and said MIT will hold a memorial service in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in spring. 4 Mixed · 2Reflecting on Apollo in a 2009 MIT News interview, Hamilton said: "Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners." 1 2