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Margaret Hamilton, who led MIT's Apollo flight software team, dies at 90
Margaret Hamilton, who led the software engineering team at MIT's Instrumentation Lab during NASA's Apollo program, died on September 30 at 90. MIT News, which reported her death, credits her with helping to establish software engineering as a discipline of its own.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Her first programming job was a temporary MIT post writing weather prediction software with meteorologist Edward Lorenz, work that later informed his papers on chaos theory.
- From 1961 at MIT Lincoln Laboratory she wrote software for the XD-1, a prototype computer for SAGE, the first US air defense system.
- By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module software team, when more than 400 people were working on Apollo's software.
- She left MIT in the mid-1970s and went on to work as a computing entrepreneur and chief executive.
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Why it matters
- constraint Hamilton's own account set the design requirement for Apollo's onboard code: a mission allowed no second chance, so errors had to be caught on the ground before launch.
- decision Managers treated software as a black box and left the team alone, so a group of programmers, many of them in their 20s, largely set their own working methods for flight code.
- precedent A presidential citation credited her software architecture with the moon landing, which puts code in the official account of how Apollo was engineered.
Hamilton came to programming from mathematics [8]. Born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, she earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in 1958 [8]. She moved to Boston in 1959 while her husband pursued a law degree [9]. By 1965 she was 28 or 29 and preparing for graduate school [19][13]. Then her husband saw a newspaper advertisement. MIT's Instrumentation Lab, which held NASA's contract to build Apollo's onboard flight software, wanted people to "send man to the moon" [13].
In 2009 she told MIT News what the work was like [17]. "There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s," she said [17]. She also explained why the team had so much room: "Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust." [18]
Her concern with reliability started before Apollo [12]. According to MIT, she took an interest in software reliability at Lincoln Laboratory, when the concept was new and largely unexplored [12]. On Apollo she wrote software for the uncrewed missions first. She was then promoted to lead the team developing onboard flight software for the crewed missions [15]. It took her three years to go from the project's first programmer to assistant director [20]. The obituary does not say how many of Apollo's software staff reported to her directly.
President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 [5]. Its citation credited her this way: "Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon." [6] I think "architecture" is the exact word in that sentence. With hundreds of people working on a program's software, the lead's work is the structure everyone else builds inside [16].
MIT credits her with more than 130 publications [3]. Olivier de Weck, interim head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, compared her work with how young the field was when she entered it. "She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," he said [7].
What to watch
- How MIT's full obituary describes the 'defensive' programming it links to her Apollo work, which would show her reliability methods in technical terms.
- Whether NASA or MIT's aeronautics department releases records showing how the Command and Service Module software team was organised, including how many of Apollo's 400-plus software staff reported to her.