{"id":623945,"date":"2026-10-08T03:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T03:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/623945\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T03:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T03:10:08","slug":"margaret-hamilton-trailblazer-whose-software-powered-apollo-11-moon-landing-dies-at-90-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/623945\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Hamilton, trailblazer whose software powered Apollo 11 moon landing, dies at 90 | Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margaret Hamilton, the computer pioneer whose software powered the first moon landing, has died, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced<\/a> on Wednesday. She was 90.<\/p>\n

In an era before titles such as software engineer and computer scientist became mainstream, Hamilton, who died on 30 September, learned to program under the tutelage of a renowned MIT meteorologist.<\/p>\n

She continued to perfect the craft in an MIT laboratory, writing software that could detect enemy aircraft. When the institute received a Nasa contract to develop the Apollo onboard flight software, she jumped at the opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d she told<\/a> the Guardian in 2019.<\/p>\n

In 1969, minutes before the Apollo 11<\/a> spacecraft was set to make history by landing on the lunar surface, an onboard computer\u2019s alarm rang, indicating an emergency.<\/p>\n

Faced with a decision of whether to abort the mission, the spacecraft continued on. The software was working just as Hamilton and her team intended.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem but was compensating for it \u2013 restarting and re-establishing the highest priority tasks. The error detection and recovery mechanisms had come to the rescue,\u201d Hamilton said.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama referenced the incident when he presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur astronauts didn\u2019t have much time, but thankfully they had Margaret Hamilton,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Hamilton is survived by her daughter, a son-in-law, two grandsons and four great grandchildren, according<\/a> to MIT.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the mission, in a 2009 interview<\/a> with MIT News, Hamilton said: \u201cLooking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Margaret Hamilton, the computer pioneer whose software powered the first moon landing, has died, the Massachusetts Institute of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-623945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}