Margaret Hamilton, who worked on NASA’s Apollo program, dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, a pioneering computer scientist who led the team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program, died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 90. Her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, confirmed the death to The Associated Press on Thursday.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that Hamilton's work helped make humanity's first journeys to the moon possible. Olivier de Weck, the Apollo program professor at MIT, told MIT News that calling Hamilton a pioneer would be a dramatic understatement, noting she was a software engineer when the field was in its infancy and led a team to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved.

Hamilton graduated with a mathematics degree from Earlham College in 1958 and joined MIT in 1959. By 1968, she was assistant director in charge of the command and service module team at MIT's Instrumentation Lab, which held the NASA contract for Apollo. She later founded two software companies.

In recent years, Hamilton gained wider recognition, including a figure in a 2017 Lego set celebrating women of NASA and attention during the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Her daughter said Hamilton was happy to be acknowledged but was a reserved person for whom the spotlight was not natural.

Lauren Hamilton described her mother as a mathematician interested in the abstraction of turning thought into software, as well as an eccentric and fun character who loved vintage clothing and had a mischievous sense of humor.

Sources: Las Vegas Review-Journal