 |
| Photo by the Author |
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Chris Hadfield. These are the names that we first think of when we hear the words NASA, astronauts, or going to the moon. When you hear about the amazing feats that an organization like NASA has been able to achieve, you can’t help but let the men be your first thought.
Why? Because for many of us, those are the only names we’re taught. But what about the women who’ve done so much to help us see the stars? Sally Ride, the first woman to ever make it into space? Nancy Grace Roman, the first-ever female executive at NASA? And of course, how can we even have this conversation without mentioning the woman that made the moon landing possible?
Who is Margaret Hamilton?
Margaret Hamilton, born on August 17, 1936, is a computer scientist and systems engineer best known for her work that helped in the success of the Apollo 11 mission. The computer code she had written for the command and lunar modules in the Apollo missions is what helped NASA in their journeys; thanks to her software that helped detect errors in the spacecraft’s system and to recover information in the case of a computer crash, Apollo 11 became a success.
Without her, Neil Armstrong would never have been able to take that first step on the moon. What’s even more badass? She and her team managed to write thousands and thousands of pages worth of code when being a software engineer wasn’t even a thing yet. In fact, she’s largely credited for inventing the term. "We had no choice but to be pioneers,” she once said.
Before and after NASA
Before working at NASA, Hamilton is in no shortage of achievements. She graduated from Earlham College with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a minor in Philosophy and quickly found a teaching job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Here, she began to work on programming software that would help people predict the weather.
Later on, in the 1960s, Hamilton was asked to join the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Project, more commonly known as SAGE. Here, she would write software that would assist the U.S. in identifying enemy aircraft. She would also go on to create software for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories that would help in tracking satellites. After this, she would then go on to work at NASA to help on the Apollo missions.
Over the course of her career, Hamilton has managed to write over 130 papers, has participated in 60 projects, and has been a crucial component in at least 6 major programs. Shortly after leaving MIT, she would become the founder of both Higher Order Software and Hamilton Technologies. In 2003, she received the Exceptional Space Act Award from NASA, and in 2016 she would go on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Despite all these achievements in her career, Hamilton doesn’t shy away from talking about the number of times she and her work were belittled while she was at NASA.
The last woman standing
Hamilton takes note of the fact that during her first arrival at NASA, she was the only woman there that was assigned to writing software. “Within a couple of years there would be a few – and I did have some working for me – but not many.”
"There were always many more men.” Out of the office, Hamilton felt that she was living in a man’s world. She talked about how while she was still at MIT, women couldn’t get loans at the credit union if they didn’t have the signature of their husbands. And even outside the walls of NASA, engineering was still very much a male-dominated field to work in.
When Hamilton started working, the assignments she got felt pointless. "Nobody really paid much attention to what I was doing, because it was 'never going to happen,'" She recounted.
And when she started talking about creating new software for NASA that would help detect errors in the system, she was shot down. She was told that "Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake,” even though the Apollo 1 mission ended in the death of three astronauts, and Apollo 8 failed due to the system crashing–which is the exact mistake that Hamilton felt would happen.
Even when she started growing to become a leader in the project, men still doubted her; she was even told by one of her bosses that he felt the men under her may rebel due to the fact that she was a woman. All she said was that they were perfectly fine with having a female boss and that the work mattered more to them than gender did.
As time passes by, Margaret Hamilton is getting more and more of the recognition that she deserves. One piece of advice she wants to leave the world with? "Don’t always listen to the so-called experts."
