NASA Project
The most famous project Hamilton worked on was the Apollo 11 space flight. She is now known as “the woman who sent man to the moon” because of her important work on Apollo’s flight software.
In a time when women were delegated to lower positions in the engineering industry, Margaret Hamilton was able to rise above gender inequality and work alongside her male counterparts doing high-powered technical work. She is credited with coining the term “software engineering,” a phrase she started using in order to place more weight on software development as a critical component in the engineering industry.
She also worked on a team at MIT that created the code for the world’s first portable computer. Her team at MIT was working on the Apollo space mission at the time and she eventually became the director and supervisor of software programming for Apollo and Skylab. Hamilton had an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Earlham College, but software engineering courses at this time were essentially non-existent so she taught herself through hand-on experience. She would often bring her daughter to the lab with her and work away coding software for the Apollo command module computer.
In 1986 Margaret founded her own company “to accelerate the evolution of our technology and to introduce it to more users.”
The most famous project Hamilton worked on was the Apollo 11 space flight. She is now known as “the woman who sent man to the moon” because of her important work on Apollo’s flight software.
Hamilton worked on a team to create a computer system that could predict weather systems and track their movements through simulators. It came to be used by the military in the Civil War for anti-aircraft air defense from potential Soviet attacks.
