{"id":13436,"date":"2018-10-03T15:34:24","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T22:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tynker.com\/blog\/?p=13436"},"modified":"2023-10-27T03:26:40","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T10:26:40","slug":"margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-for-nasas-apollo-11-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tynker.com\/blog\/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-for-nasas-apollo-11-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer for NASA\u2019s Apollo 11 Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer for NASA\u2019s Apollo 11 Mission<\/h2>\n

\u201cThere was no choice but to be pioneers.\u201d<\/span><\/h3>\n

That\u2019s what Margaret Hamilton<\/span> has to say<\/span><\/a> about her experience engineering software for NASA at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the 1960s. Back then, software engineering was a relatively obscure profession and<\/span> regarded by many<\/span><\/a> \u201cas an art and as magic, not a science.\u201d Margaret Hamilton is<\/span> credited with coining the term<\/span><\/a> \u201csoftware engineering\u201d–the implementation of programming methodologies used to make a project happen–during her work at MIT and, along with her team, wrote the code for Apollo 11\u2019s on-board flight software.<\/span><\/p>\n

Margaret Hamilton was born in 1936 in Paoli, Indiana and grew up under the intellectual influence of her family<\/span> heroes<\/span><\/a>: her father, Kenneth Heafield, a philosopher and poet; and her grandfather, a writer, head schoolmaster, and Quaker minister. She<\/span> studied mathematics and philosophy at Earlham College<\/span><\/a>, and after graduation married James Hamilton and taught high school mathematics for a time. While her husband attended law school, Hamilton started her career at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) by programming weather-predicting software.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the early 1960s Hamilton learned about MIT\u2019s NASA contract to develop the software for sending man to the moon. She knew it would be the<\/span> opportunity of a lifetime<\/span><\/a>, so she applied and got a job working on the software engineering team.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her role as a software engineer for the NASA project, and eventually as the<\/span> lead software engineer<\/span><\/a> at MIT\u2019s Instrumentation Lab, Hamilton coined the very term \u201csoftware engineering,\u201d<\/span> as she explains<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSoftware during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering\u2026I fought to bring the software legitimacy\u2026and thus I began to use the term \u2018software engineering\u2019 to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As a<\/span> young mother<\/span><\/a>, Hamilton often brought her daughter Lauren to the lab on nights and weekends. One day Lauren accidentally crashed the MIT command module simulator by playing with the display-and-keyboard unit, called the DSKY. Hamilton realized that an astronaut could make the same mistake in flight. She encountered resistance in trying to put more error detection and recovery into the software as higher-ups told her: \u201cAstronauts don\u2019t make mistakes. They\u2019re trained to be perfect.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately, Hamilton\u2019s recommendations for creating software that could respond to human error were eventually taken seriously. In 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission\u2014the mission to land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon\u2014Hamilton\u2019s vision of effective software proved its worth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just minutes before Apollo 11 was set to land on the moon, the unexpected happened. Hamilton<\/span> recalls<\/span><\/a> those crucial moments:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDue to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I am overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I am going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e. the ones needed for landing\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

The software\u2019s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones…If the computer had not recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Photo Credit: NASA<\/h5>\n

Among other accomplishments, including becoming the CEO of Hamilton Technologies (the company she started after Higher Order Software), Margaret Hamilton received NASA\u2019s Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003 and, in 2016, President Obama<\/span> awarded<\/span><\/a> her the Presidential Medal of Honor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her<\/span> advice<\/span><\/a> to young people who want to succeed in STEM careers? \u201cI believe it is\u2026important to learn (or be around) things like music, art, philosophy, linguistics, and math including logic; any of which could help improve one\u2019s being an excellent programmer\/problem solver\/thinker and to have a more global perspective on things\u2026.One should not be afraid to\u2026stand alone or to be different; and not to be afraid to be wrong or to make and admit mistakes, for only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer for NASA\u2019s Apollo 11 Mission \u201cThere was no choice but to be pioneers.\u201d That\u2019s what Margaret Hamilton has to say about her experience engineering software for NASA at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the 1960s. Back then, software engineering was a relatively obscure profession and regarded by many \u201cas an art and as magic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13437,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[510,50,12,106],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-13436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-block-coding","category-girls-coding","category-ideas-and-tips","category-women-in-stem","tag-women-in-stem"],"yoast_head":"\nMargaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer for NASA\u2019s Apollo 11 Mission - Tynker Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Learn about Margaret Hamilton, the lead software engineer for NASA's Apollo 11 mission, and her pioneering contributions to computer science.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tynker.com\/blog\/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-for-nasas-apollo-11-mission\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer for NASA\u2019s Apollo 11 Mission - 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