“Our astronauts didn’t have a lot of time, but fortunately, they had Margaret Hamilton.” – Barack Obama
In July 1969, the entire world tuned in to television and radio. There wasn’t a person who wasn’t tuning in to watch humanity step on the Moon for the first time. The world watched attentively as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin jumped onto the lunar surface and the American flag flew behind them. What the world never realized, however, was the failure that almost prevented the astronauts’ arrival, which occurred just minutes before they could land.
Apollo 11, in which they were traveling, experienced anomalies before landing. The astronauts faced terrible difficulties as they were minutes away from reaching the satellite. At that moment, the astronauts glimpsed the craters on the Moon, as if they were small volcanoes, and their excitement was so great that they did not hesitate to pass it on to the technicians in the cockpit on Earth. Everyone paid attention until the alarms went off indicating an error.
This only happened when danger was imminent and the first thing on the minds of both the astronauts and the control center was that they were possibly facing a resounding failure that would lead to the decline of the agency and the triumph of the Soviet Union in the space race. As was to be expected, a crisis invaded them to the point that they began to say goodbye and, like a soap opera, tears were almost present. However, almost like a miracle, a woman arrived to save even NASA’s reputation: Margaret Hamilton.
The engineer then intervened, introducing a change in the system that allowed her to give priority to the vital functions of both the astronauts and the spacecraft, so it was her ingenuity and reaction that saved the loss of the most epic mission in the history of human space exploration so far, and the public did not even realize it.
Margaret Hamilton at NASA
Hamilton was a woman who fought not only to get into NASA, but once inside, she tirelessly sought ways to make the use and creation of software seen as part of science and not as an art or an “extra” job. It was time-consuming and required effort and a lot of other applied engineering knowledge for a very elaborate system. So, at just 24 years of age and with a degree in mathematics, she joined the research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was hired by NASA to be part of the official space program team on the Apollo 11 mission. Hamilton stood out from her peers who were dedicated to following orders, while she, on her initiative, began to design a specific system that she spoke very little about.
When she presented them with the prototype of the system, they were amazed at the intelligence of the woman with glasses and a slim figure, leaving her in charge of the software of the lunar module and command of the space mission module. No one knew how to program, only she, who had taught herself, and even invented formulas and ways to do it; however, most of her colleagues made fun of her for being a woman.
Hamilton faced a macho society unable to accept that a woman was in charge of such an important position. During her first months, she did not even receive financial remuneration, since she needed a husband so that the payment would be given to him. Even with that, she fought for her salary to be entirely hers. Despite such obstacles, she recognizes that it was two men who encouraged her to continue in the struggle: her father and grandfather, who longed for only one thing: to see Maggy’s intelligence applied to lead humanity to an epic feat, to set foot on the lunar surface.
Hamilton’s exploits remained a secret in history, still, she kept working to gather more achievements. In the eighties, Hamilton developed her own software company and taught other women and men to program. For her, it was not enough to know how to use a computer, people needed to know how things work to be able to put themselves at the service of the community and have a positive impact on technology.
Margaret Hamilton’s contributions
Margaret Hamilton not only pioneered software as an internal operating mechanism but also created the term and career of “software engineering.” Her invention managed to eliminate low-priority tasks and pay attention to the most important ones, making her algorithm system recognize the problem and save the astronauts by recovering the functions of Apollo 11, being a fundamental part of the first moon landing in history. Moreover, Maggie was the woman who opened the door to her gender in a purely male-dominated world and managed to be recognized by history and the government of her country with the Medal of Freedom in 2016. Perhaps it was too late, but it is enough that the world has known about her, even 48 years after her great feat.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
