Early career at MIT

Margaret Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936 and graduated from Earlham College in 1958 with a degree in mathematics. She married James Cox Hamilton that year, and when he began law studies in Boston she took a temporary job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. NZZ reports that she needed the money after the birth of her daughter Lauren. She first worked in the lab of the MIT mathematician Edward Lorenz, where she got to know a computer used for weather forecasting. Sources date her hiring differently, to 1964 in NZZ and to 1965 in TheJournal.

Software for Apollo

A newspaper advertisement from MIT seeking software developers to put people on the Moon changed her plans, and she was hired to work on the project. At the start she was the only woman on the team and the only person responsible for software development, according to NZZ. By 1968, MIT says she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo's software. Tgcom24 reports that she led a team of 100 engineers that designed the software guiding the Apollo missions. She is credited with coining the term 'software engineering' while working on the program.

To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer - to say she was ahead of her time - would be a dramatic understatement.

De Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, made the statement in an MIT announcement.

The 1202 alarm

On 20 July 1969, warnings flashed on Apollo 11's onboard computer minutes before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to touch down on the Moon. Armstrong radioed Mission Control about a 'program alarm' with the code '1202'. The error indicated the computer was overloaded and was dropping low-priority tasks to focus on flight safety. NASA says Hamilton's software intervened about three minutes before the Eagle landed, overriding a faulty script so the mission could safely continue. Mission Control gave the go-ahead, and the lander reached the surface with only enough fuel for an estimated 30 seconds of flight.

Recognition and legacy

In 2016 Barack Obama awarded Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom for overseeing the team that developed Apollo's onboard flight software. Obama said in that ceremony:

Our astronauts didn't have much time, but thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton.

After leaving MIT, she founded two software companies, Higher Order Software and Hamilton Technologies. She published more than 130 works, and the following year she was made a LEGO minifigure as part of the 'Women of NASA' set. Reflecting on her time at MIT, she said:

There was no other choice but to be pioneers.

Tributes

MIT's statement called Hamilton a computing pioneer and said she died on 30 September. NASA chief Jared Isaacman paid tribute on X, calling her 'a pioneer whose work helped make Apollo and humanity's first journeys to the moon possible.' Her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, said the cause of death was multiple organ failure.