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Some would say that Margaret Hamilton was a jack of all trades and yet, a master of all. Some tools in Margaret’s toolbelt include computer science, engineering, and business ownership. On top of this magnificent feat, Margaret’s work was pivotal in NASA’s Apollo Program, also known as, the time we landed on the moon.
“We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world. There was no choice but to be pioneers.” – Margaret’s recount of NASA’s success with landing on the moon.
Margaret was born in Paoli, Indiana on August 17, 1936, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield. Later, her family moved to Michigan where Margaret graduated from Hancock High School in 1954. It was there that she found her love for mathematics. She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College. In 1958 She earned a bachelor’s in mathematics with a minor in philosophy.
Upon graduating, Margaret intended to enroll in graduate school to pursue a degree in abstract mathematics at a different university. However, that thought was short-lived when she began working for Edward Norton Lorenz of the meteorology department at MIT. In this position, she developed software for predicting the weather and programming on the LGP-30 and the PDP-1 computers. At this time, software engineering and computer science were not yet established professions, making Margaret’s work that much more significant.
Continuing with her experimentation with computer science at MIT, Margaret worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project from 1961 to 1963. It was at the MIT Lincoln Lab that Margaret started to perform innovative work. Margaret was one of the programmers who wrote software for the prototype AN/FSQ-7 Computer, which was then used by the United States Air Force to search for possible enemy aircrafts. She also wrote the software for a satellite tracking project at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories.
Her continued work on the SAGE project was the start of a grander path paved for Margaret. In an interview, Margaret explained that as a beginner in the organization, they would assign you this program which no one could ever get to work. She claimed that the person who wrote it took delight in its difficulty, and even wrote the program in Greek and Latin. Despite this, Margaret was the first one to get the program to work, and even printed out the program answers in Latin and Greek. It was her success on this project that made her a top candidate for NASA as the lead developer for Apollo flight software.
Margaret joined the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 and was the first programmer hired for the Apollo project. She became the Director of the Software Engineering Division, where she was responsible for the team writing and testing all on-board, in-flight software for the Apollo spacecraft’s Command and Lunar Module. Additionally, another team under her guidance designed and developed the systems software, which included error detection and recovery software such as restarts and the Display Interface Routines (Priority Displays). All of these developments were imperative to NASA’s Apollo spacecraft, and all of it was developed, designed, and overseen by Margaret Hamilton.
On July 20, 1969, Margaret and her team were faced with the biggest decision of their lives. As the lunar module, Eagle was approaching the surface of the moon, her computer software was put to the test. Mission Control was faced with a go/no-go decision when the computers and priority displays began flashing warning messages. The computer was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the lander’s rendezvous radar. Later inspections would concur that the switch had been set incorrectly. With full confidence in herself and her team, Margaret told the astronauts to proceed. Thankfully, NASA fully trusted Margaret and her software, and just 30 seconds of flight later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin successfully landed on the moon.
“I was not concentrating on the mission, per se. I was concentrating on the software… My God. Look what happened. We did it. It worked. It was exciting.”
Margaret received over 11 awards for her groundbreaking efforts in the Apollo 11 mission. Additionally, she cofounded Higher Order Software, a software company to further develop error prevention. Her products were used in many government programs, including NASA, and the U.S. Air Force. Ultimately, her achievements during this time were monumental since computer technology was in its infancy. While software engineers are not typically viewed as heroes, Margaret portrayed extreme bravery as a young woman engineer.
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