Margaret Hamilton, who led a software team for NASA’s Apollo program, dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, a groundbreaking computer scientist who led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA’s moon-bound Apollo program and later in life was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology, has died. She was 90.

Hamilton died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, told The Associated Press on Thursday. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that her work helped make humanity’s first journeys to the moon possible.

“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement,” Olivier de Weck, the Apollo program professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and interim head of its aeronautics and astronautics department, told MIT News, a publication of the university’s communications office.

“She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy,” de Weck continued, “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.”

In recent years, a photo circulated online showing a smiling Hamilton, in her early 30s, standing next to a towering stack of pages containing codes her team used during the Apollo project. A Lego set celebrating the women of NASA that was unveiled in 2017 included a figure of Hamilton. And the marking in 2019 of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing also brought attention, her daughter said.

“She definitely went from nobody knowing who she was to suddenly everyone knowing who she was, especially in her field,” Lauren Hamilton said. “And I think she was really happy to be acknowledged for what she did. But she was kind of a reserved person so the spotlight wasn’t necessarily a natural thing for her.”

Hamilton graduated with a degree in mathematics from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, in 1958 and went to work for MIT in 1959. Her early focus there included working with a meteorology professor on weather prediction software, according to the MIT News article. In the mid-1960s, she started at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, which had a NASA contract for Apollo.

After first working on software for uncrewed missions, she later led the team developing the onboard flight software for the crewed missions, and by 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the command and service module team, according to MIT News.

“We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s,” Hamilton told MIT News in 2009. “Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure.”

“Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust,” she continued. “We had to find a way, and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”

She worked at the Instrumentation Lab into the 1970s and then founded two software companies, according to MIT News.

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Lauren Hamilton said her mother’s biggest interest was in the abstract. “She was very much a mathematician and into the abstraction of how to turn thought, I guess, into software,” she said.

She said her mother was also “a really eccentric and fun character” who loved collecting vintage clothing and had “a very mischievous sense of humor.”

“She encountered a lot of sexism in her field but she didn’t come back aggressively,” Lauren Hamilton said. “She would disarm people with her sense of humor or … just kind of dominate quietly.”

Born on Aug. 17, 1936, in Indiana, Hamilton grew up mostly in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, her daughter said, and she lived in Cambridge from when she was in her early 20s until her death.

Hamilton received many awards and accolades, including being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2016 by President Barack Obama.