Helping Man Land on the Moon

Happy birthday, Margaret Hamilton! Albeit belated, the 80^th birthday of Ms. Hamilton is a day that should be celebrated worldwide. Earning her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Earlham College and participating in postgraduate work in meteorology at MIT, Margaret moved to Lincoln Laboratory as part of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System (SAGE) project (creating the first air defense system for the country). A young lady at the time—age 33—when she led in the successful landing of Apollo 11, Margaret not only popularized the concept of software engineering but helped to pave the way for women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).

In 1961, Hamilton and her team began to work alongside NASA in hopes of developing a guidance system for the anticipated moon landing of 1969. In this well-known photograph pictured above, Margaret is standing alongside all of the guidance codes used to land Apollo 11’s astronauts safely to the moon without having to abort their mission.

“Approximately three minutes before Eagle's touchdown on the moon,” recalls NASA, “the software [created by Hamilton and company] overrode a command to switch the flight computer's priority processing to a radar system whose 'on' switch had been manually activated due to a faulty written operations script provided to the crew. The action by the software permitted the mission to safely continue.” Hamilton helped to, according to Time, “…enable the computer to figure out which of the multiple processes it had to do was more important,” weeding out the lesser priority jobs containing irrelevant data. Aside from the alarms sounding due to the brief software malfunction, the trip went off without a hitch.

Margaret Hamilton’s contribution to man’s moon landing earned her the Exceptional Space Act Award, and most recently the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award, pioneering the way for women’s scientific and technical contributions while laying the building blocks for future software engineering. After her work on the Apollo software, Hamilton consulted on NASA's space shuttle and Skylab programs before moving to the private sector. In 1986, she opened a school titled Hamilton Technologies, Inc., guiding students and helping them uncover a more universal systems language. With this academy, Hamilton helped to ensure future exploration of the universe by creating cost-efficient, reliable software. In response to her influence in STEM over the past half-century, Margaret only has this to say: “I hope we continue with exploration.” So the next time you land yourself in a conversation about the Apollo 11 moon landing, amidst the chatter of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, I hope you reference the woman who made it all possible—Ms. Margaret Hamilton.

References

Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11Hamilton.html

MIT News: http://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apollo-code-0817

TIME Magazine: http://time.com/3948364/moon-landing-apollo-11-margaret-hamilton/

WIRED: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/