Margaret Hamilton, who led Apollo's onboard software team, dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, who led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program, died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 90. Her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on X that Hamilton's work helped make humanity's first journeys to the moon possible. [ 5 ]

The Boston Globe reported that Hamilton led a 100-person team whose software guided Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe moon landing. She was the first female programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory in 1965 and later became its director of software engineering. [ 2 ]

The project developed two 70-pound onboard computers for Apollo flights: one in the command module and another in the lunar module. The Globe reported that the onboard computers had only 72 kilobytes of storage memory. Hamilton brought her young daughter to work on evenings and weekends and is credited with popularizing the term "software engineering" to describe her team's work. [ 2 ]

Olivier de Weck, an MIT professor and interim head of its aeronautics and astronautics department, told MIT News that Hamilton both developed code and led a team at a time when software engineering was in its infancy. The Associated Press reported his remarks in its account of her death. [ 5 ]

Hamilton gained renewed attention as a photograph of her beside a towering stack of Apollo code circulated online. The Seattle Times reported that a 2017 Lego set celebrating women of NASA included her figure, and that the Apollo 11 landing's 50th anniversary in 2019 brought further attention. Her daughter said Hamilton was happy to receive recognition, although she was reserved and the spotlight did not come naturally to her. [ 6 ]