HAMILTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

Woman Whose Code Saved the Moon Landing Dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton led the development of software used in NASA’s historic 1969 mission.

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Margaret Hamilton, the trailblazing computer scientist whose software was crucial in putting the first astronauts on the moon, has died at age 90. Hamilton led the software engineering team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for NASA’s Apollo program. She is credited with popularizing the term “software engineering” through her work and with saving the Apollo 11 mission. In 1969, just minutes before the spacecraft was due to land on the moon, Apollo 11’s onboard computer started flashing alarms indicating an error. Mission Control was debating whether to abort the entire landing. However, the software that Hamilton and her team built came to the rescue, telling the onboard computer to prioritize essential tasks—the landing itself—and canceling less important ones as part of its recovery mechanism. “If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was,” Hamilton wrote in 1971. Hamilton’s software engineering work was immortalized in an iconic photo of her standing next to a tower of books of code used in the Apollo 11 mission. Barack Obama awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.