Margaret Hamilton was the chief programmer of the on-board software that landed the Apollo 11 misson on the moon. She was one of the first female programmers and her code built the foundation of software engineering.
A Timeline of Her Life:
- 1936: Margaret Elaine Heafield was born on August 17, 1936 in Paoli, Indiana, to parents Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield. She has two younger siblings named David and Kathryn.
- 1952: The family moved to Michigan, where Margaret attended Hancock High School.
- 1955: After graduating high school, she studied mathematics at the University of Michigan before transfering to Earlham College.
- 1958: While studying at Earlham, she met her husband James Cox Hamilton. The couple got married on June 15, 1958, right after she graduated from Earlham with a BA in mathematics and a minor in philosophy.
- 1959: Margaret started working under Edward Norton Lorenz at the Meteorology department at MIT. She was tasked with developing software that predicts weather paterns. She gave birth to her daughter, Lauren, on November 10 of the same year.
- 1961: For the next two years, she worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project at the MIT Lincon Lab. The software was a prototype for an enemy aircraft detection system which would later be used by the U.S. Air Force.
- 1963: Hamilton joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, which worked on the Apollo Space Missions. She was initially hired as a programmer, but was soon moved to systems designs.
- 1964: She was promoted to leading the team tasked with creating the Comand Module software for the Apollo 11 mission. The software was responsible for navigation and lunar landing commands. Margaret and her team created the software needed for space flight with nothing to reference. She made unprecedented advances in software engineering due to her ingenuity.
- 1967: Margaret files for divorce from her husband James.
- 1969: Her years of diligent work the command module finally paid off when the Apollo 11 mission touched down on the moon. Her flight software worked flawlessly during the landing. In the same year, she marries her current husband Dan Lickly.
- 1973: Her code was used in Skylab space missions, which launched a series of satellites into orbit.
- 1976: Hamilton co-founds a company called Higher Order Software (HOS) in Cambridge, Massachusets. Using her knowledge from NASA, her company developed software aimed at reducing user error. Her company's software was implemented in many government programs.
- 1986: After leaving Higher Order Software in 1985, she founded her own company, aptly named Hamilton Technologies Inc. The company revolved around Universal Systems Language (USL), a system modeling language developed by Hamilton during her time at NASA.
- 2016: She is awarded the Presedential Medal of Freedom from President Barak Obama for her work in leading the development of software for the Apollo 11 space mission.
- 2017: She is one of four women to be featured in LEGO's "Women of NASA" set, alongside NASA astronauts Mae Jemison, and Sally Ride, as well as astronomer Nancy Grace Roman.
- 2019: Google paid tribute to her accomplishments 50 years after the Apollo 11 mission. They confirgured mirrors at their Ivanpah plant to create a picture of Hamilton using moonlight.
To find out more about Margaret Hamilton visit her Wikipedia Page.
