Margaret Hamilton, who led software team for Apollo missions, dies at 90
by The Washington Times AI News Desk · The Washington TimesMargaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the MIT team that wrote onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo moon missions, died Sept. 30. She was 90.
MIT announced her death Wednesday in an obituary. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Hamilton, who authored more than 130 publications, worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and helped establish software engineering as a distinct discipline, the university said. She later became a computing entrepreneur and chief executive.
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Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said it would be “a dramatic understatement” to call her a pioneer. He said she wrote advanced code herself and also led a team using a nascent technology to build one of the most complex systems humanity had achieved.
Her best-known contribution came during the July 1969 Apollo 11 landing. Moments before the Eagle module touched down, the onboard computer flagged a 1202 error, an overload tied to a fault in a hardware switch, according to MIT. Hamilton’s team had built priority-driven software that could shed unnecessary background tasks to protect critical ones. Mission control in Houston trusted the software and allowed the landing to proceed, MIT said.
Earlier, MIT said, she had pushed for a safeguard after her 4-year-old daughter, Lauren, accidentally crashed a flight simulator by launching a pre-launch program in mid-flight. Hamilton was overruled because astronauts were expected not to make that mistake. During Apollo 8 in 1968, Jim Lovell inadvertently launched the same program, wiping navigational data, and her proposed changes were then integrated.
Born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Earlham College in 1958 and moved to Boston the next year while her husband studied law. She took a temporary MIT post working with meteorologist Edward Lorenz on weather-prediction software, then joined Lincoln Laboratory in 1961 to work on the SAGE air defense system. In 1965 she was hired as the first programmer on the Apollo project at MIT and the first woman programmer on it. By 1968, she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software.
As Apollo wound down, the Instrumentation Lab spun out of MIT to become Draper Laboratory. Hamilton founded Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies a decade later.
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President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Her other honors included NASA’s Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003, the Computer History Museum Fellow Award in 2017, the Intrepid Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 and induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2022.
She became an icon for women in science and technology after a photo of her beside a stack of Apollo code printouts circulated online. In 2015, the Apollo 11 guidance computer source code was posted to GitHub, where it credits her as Colossus programming leader. She became an official Lego minifigure in 2017.
She is survived by her daughter, Lauren Hamilton; her son-in-law, Richard Selesnick; two grandsons; four great-grandchildren; and her siblings John, David and Kathryn. A memorial service will be held in the spring in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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