And RIP Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon, dies at 90

The computer scientist behind groundbreaking research that helped land Nasa’s astronauts on the Moon, has died aged 90.
Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team who developed the software for Nasa’s Apollo missions, which coined the term “software engineering”.
Hamilton’s former employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), confirmed her death, adding she died on 30 September.
“To say Hamilton was a pioneer – to say she was ahead of her time – would be a dramatic understatement,” MIT said in its statement, before acknowledging that she was a software engineer before it was mainstream.
Hamilton worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s and managed the Software Engineering Division.
It was in this division that she led a team of engineers writing and testing all onboard in-flight software for Nasa’s Apollo 11 project that guided US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the Moon.
“I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before. I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired,” she told the Guardian in 2019.

The photo of her standing next to the printout of the Apollo 11 code is a classic, of course; now there’s probably a mobile phone app that can do the exact same thing. I was saying yesterday about what changes Eva Marie Saint must’ve seen in her industry, but they must’ve been even more so in Margaret’s. Alas that she didn’t live to see the next landing, but at least she got to witness this year’s Artemis mission…