Romance Books '4' Us: Margaret Hamilton, Software Engineer: It Took More Than A Village To Send A Man To The Moon

Posted by R. Ann Siracusa

A CHALLENGE For the READER

This month is the fiftieth anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the moon. July 20,1969. The BIG 5-0! The Apollo 11 mission was a “big deal” at that time in our history, and it is still a “big deal." No doubt we'll be hearing a lot about this historical event in the media. The movie may be on TV every day for longer than many of us would like.

During this momentous event, we focus primarily on the men who made the 500,000 mile journey --as we should-- but let’s not forget the other 400,000 men and women who made the flight possible. We should also honor all those scientists, engineers, technicians, and support staff necessary to deal with a vast number of system and sub-systems necessary to put these men on the moon.

The Challenge: Pay attention and listen for the name Margaret Hamilton. If you hear it, let me know … but I’m betting no one will mention her and they should.

Apollo 11 - Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin
By NASA - NASA Human Space Flight Gallery (image link)https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102412

PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER FOR MARGARET HAMILTON

Margaret Hamilton was the head of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory when the company contracted with NASA to develop the on-board flight software for the Apollo program. Her team developed the framework of software engineering for Apollo’s guidance and navigation system. In fact, she invented and named the discipline of software engineering. She published over one hundred papers and reports about the 60 projects and six major program to which she was assigned while working with NASA.

Official photo for NASA, 1989
Photo source: https://scientificwomen.net/women/hamilton-margaret-99

IN THE BEGINNING
Margaret Hamilton (née Heafield) was born in Indiana in 1936. After studying at the University of Michigan for a while, she transferred to Earlham College and graduated in 1958 with a B.A. in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. There she met James Hamilton and they subsequently married. After graduation she taught high school math.

Hamilton and her husband moved to Boston where James attended Harvard Law School. Her plan was to attend Brandeis University to study abstract math after her husband graduated, so she accepted an interim position as a programmer at MIT, working on programs to predict weather. While she was at MIT she also did postgraduate work in meteorology.

In the early 1960s she transferred to MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory where she worked on military defense systems and wrote programs to identify enemy aircraft.

FLY ME TO THE MOON
Hamilton moved on to a position at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory (which later became the independent Charles Stark Draper laboratory) and was there when NASA contracted with the Lab to develop the guidance systems for the Apollo Program.

She headed the team responsible for developing the software for the guidance and control systems of the in-flight command and lunar modules.

In later interviews, years after the fact, Hamilton said that computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines at the time. The scientists and programmers simply learned by doing -- apparently over and over -- until it worked. She and her colleagues developed the paradigm ideas in programming writing the code for the world’s first portable computer.

“When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton said. “The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days.” https://www.wired.com/2015/margaret-hamilton

As the project progressed, it soon became apparent how crucial the software was to the success of the mission. By 1965, Margaret was responsible for all the onboard flight software.
Margaret Hamilton inside mock-up of the Apollo command module.
Photo Credit: MIT Photo Source: en.wikipedia.org//Margaret_Hamilton

ASTRONAUTS DO NOT MAKE MISTAKES

There are many significant achievements in Hamilton’s career. I won’t bother with the details. If you’re interested, I have a good list of sources.

In my opinion, there are two significant reason why Hamilton stands out among the many thousands who contributed to the success of Apollo 11: Her constant focus on reality and the need for reliability – the systems had to work correctly the first time – and her personal foresight that saved the mission from being scrubbed.

Here’s how it happened. In addition to being the Mother of the field of Software Engineering, Hamilton was also a real mother of a daughter, Lauren, who, at this time, was about four years old. She would bring Lauren with her to work in the evenings and on weekends, and the child would sleep or play while her mother wrote programs for the Apollo’s command module computer.Margaret and her daughter, LaurenPhoto source: hackaday.com/margaret-hamilton

As the story goes, on evening Lauren was playing with the MIT command module simulator’s display and keyboard unit when an error message appeared. The child had “crashed” the simulator by accidently activating a prelaunch program called P01 while the simulator was in flight.
As a result, Hamilton foresaw the necessity for adding error-checking codes to prevent a crash under the same circumstances. She was overruled by NASA superiors, and the reason doesn’t surprise me. Besides being too costly and time consuming, “This could never happen in space because—“ Hamilton was told emphatically, “Astronauts do not make mistakes.”

After losing her point, she instead programmed a “program note” available to NASA engineers and astronauts that said “Do not select P01 during flight.” As it turned out, the event that “could never happen,” happened.

On the fifth day of the Apollo 8 mission, Jim Lovell inadvertently selected P01 during the flight, which deleted all the navigation data the mission had collected. Without it, the computer wouldn’t be able to plot the course back to earth. Hamilton and her team spent nine hours figuring out a way to save the day, and brought Apollo 8 home to earth. After that Hamilton had no trouble convincing NASA to let her design error and recovery software for future missions.

And sure enough, there was a critical moment in the Apollo 11 mission where Hamilton’s foresight saved that mission as well. Just minutes before the Lunar lander neared the Moon’s surface, alarms went off indicating a computer overload “with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the lander’s rendezvous radar.” The alarms meant the computer couldn’t handle all the tasks at once. Because of the alarms built into the flight software’s error detection and recovery techniques, the mission, which came close to being scrubbed, managed to land on the moon.

Dr. Paul Curto, senior technologist who nominated Hamilton for a NASA Space Art Award, called her work “the foundation for ultra-reliable software design.”

WHERE NO WOMAN HAS GONE BEFORE
Hamilton remained with MIT until the mid-1970s, then left to work in private industry. She cofounded several software companies, and in March 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language (USL) and its associated automated environment, the 001 Tool Suite, based on her paradigm of Development Before The Fact for systems design and software development. Her contributions to the field have continued throughout her career.

Hamilton in 1995https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)

Based on what I read, one of the things that impressed me most about Margaret Hamilton was her constant focus on connection between humans and computer, particularly in relation to the Apollo Missions. In 2009 she describer for MIT News her contributions to the Apollo software.

“From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission. … Not only did it (the software) have to work, it had to work the first time. Not only did it have to be ultra reliable, it needed to be able to perform error detection and recovery in real time. … We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”

The world can thank Hamilton for expanding the notion of just what humanity could do on earth and beyond.

AWARDS

● 1986 - Hamilton received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, an honor bestowed by The Association for Women in Computing on individuals, men and women, who have excelled in two areas of endeavor: 1) Outstanding scientific and technical achievement, and 2) Extraordinary service to the computing community through their accomplishments and contributions on behalf of women in computing.

● 2003 - NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for scientific and technical contributions. The award of $37,200 was the largest awarded to any individual in NASA's history.

● 2009 - Outstanding Alumni Award from Earlham College.

● 2016 - Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

● 2017 - Computer History Museum Fellow Award, recognizing exceptional men and women whose computing ideas have changed the world.

● 2017 - A "Women of NASA" LEGO set went on sale featuring (among other things) mini-figurines of Hamilton, Mae Jemison, Sally Ride, and Nancy Grace Roman.

● 2018 – Hamilton was invested honoris causa by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

It saddens me (and angers me, a little) to point out that this is the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing, to which Margaret Hamilton made such a large contribution, and almost twenty years passed before she was honored for her work. The rest of the honors have been awarded after the year 2000. Better Late Than Never.□

AUTHOR R. ANN SIRACUSAConverting oxygen to carbon dioxide for more than three quarters of a century

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