Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/margaret-hamilton-led-nasa-software-team-landed-astronauts-moon-180971575/

by pallas_athena • 3 years ago

23 31 3 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

pallas_athena• 3 years ago

(2019), title was too long

carrolldunham• 3 years ago

This narrative has been questioned as a bit of feel-good manipulation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993945

parker_mountain3• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, this narrative has been floating around for a minute, and conveniently ignores _how_ she became a junior programmer. Go look it up :) suddenly "brought on as a jr" becomes less an indictment of her skills, and more an indictment of NASA management undervaluing a woman.

defrost7• 3 years ago

BA in mathematics, followed by four years cutting code in non linear dynamics at MIT Lincoln Lab and Cambridge Research Laboratories.

With that background why would hiring Hamilton as a junior at the Draper Laboratory be an indictment of NASA managaement?

rightbyte2• 3 years ago

Just tell us _how_ instead of making us guess? I tried to find the answer but given your exclusion I guess rumours of sexual relations?

didntcheck• 3 years ago

It's frustrating how often this happens. Exaggerating someone's achievements isn't helpful, it's undermining them and others like them, as now people will rationally be more sceptical of similar claims

The story of Ada Lovelace seems to get more fantastic every time I hear it. Even Turing himself, who has no shortage of actual achievements, has his role in the Enigma cracking overstated at the expense of other cryptanalysts, especially those from other countries

jadamson6• 3 years ago

I only recently read about the contribution of Polish mathematicians in breaking Enigma. Fairly sure that wasn't mentioned when I visited Bletchley Park Museum as a kid.

Ada Lovelace might not have been the "first programmer", but she was at least talented, a visionary, and an interesting character.

wrp• 3 years ago

An ironic thing about the Lovelace story is that while the popular impression of her is quite twisted, the real story is just as interesting. Stephen Wolfram wrote a nice article a while back, after he spent effort to consult primary sources to try to grasp the reality behind the myth.

As for the Poles who were actually the first to crack the Enigma code, they aren't alone among Polish mathematicians being ignored in the West. My top example of a Polish mathematician who unjustly lacks fame would be Helena Rasiowa.

Kim_Bruning2• 3 years ago

If it was really so controversial, you'd expect to at least find traces at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Margaret_Hamilton_(softwa...

(or in the archive at)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Margaret_Hamilton_(softwa...

It seems that no one has so much as questioned the narrative on Wikipedia. And the only source we have questioning it is a nitter/twitter thread (above). Which is not saying that the questioner is wrong per-se, -it could be a niche of a niche thing-, but eh.

SquidJack• 3 years ago

Lol still believe she was the one created the program

readingistuff2• 3 years ago

I didn't see that claim in the article. I saw a claim that she created an index of sorts, and that she led the program for a time.

jadamson6• 3 years ago

Yeah, no.

https://nitter.net/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200

jojobas• 3 years ago

Next you'll say Katie Bouman didn't single-handedly image black holes. Or that Elisabeth Holmes.. eh.

readingistuff2• 3 years ago

Not exactly the most unbiased source, that account has a number of obvious chips on its shoulders...

Do you have a more neutral source that Hamilton didn't lead the team when the moon landing happened?

jadamson6• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why you're claiming familiarity with the author when you haven't even read the thread. She was the lead in 1969 when they landed on the moon, however she was promoted by her soon-to-be husband after the vast majority of the software had already been written.

defrost7• 3 years ago

Apollo 8 was unmanned and hardly the final version of the flight software.

Hamilton was hired early, was a software director by 1965 and her and a team iterated development through the first crewed flights in 1968 until the end of the program in 1972.

http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

greenyoda• 3 years ago

Apollo 8 was unmanned

No, it wasn't.

From Wikipedia: "Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing, and then departed safely back to Earth. These three astronauts — Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders — were the first humans to witness and photograph the far side of the Moon and an Earthrise."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

jadamson6• 3 years ago

Firstly, Apollo 8 was certainly manned, it just didn't land on the lunar surface.

Secondly, she was not a software director in 1965. In her own words:

MARGARET HAMILTON: When I first got involved in Apollo, I was coming off the SAGE project for the Lincoln Labs. I was a young kid, and I was hired by Dan Lickly over here (pointing to Dan). And I was assigned, this was during the unmanned missions, and I was hired to do what they called programming, they also call it software engineering today, but not back then.
One of my first assignments was to work on algorithms having to do with lunar landmark tables. So I wrote programs having to do with that area. Then there was an unmanned mission that was taking off, and people came running in to tell me that the lunar landmark tables were in upside down and backwards. This was just when the mission had just taken off. And I believed, until it landed, and heard on the news everything was okay, that I was in real trouble because I was involved with these algorithms.
Then, because I was still a beginner, I was assigned responsibility for what was thought to be the least important software to be developed for the next mission. I was the most of the beginners; I mean, I was the first junior person, on this next unmanned mission

https://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/...

The unmanned flights she refers to would have been Apollo 4/5/6 test flights, so 1967/1968. Apollo software development started in 1961, she was still green in 1967. What exactly was she leading in 1965?

Kim_Bruning2• 3 years ago

Feel free to at very least post this on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Margaret_Hamilton_(softwa... , if you think it has merit.

It may or may not go very far though. I've had a look at a bunch of other posts by AnechoicMedia_ via nitter. They seem to have a bit of a bias, which makes me doubt their writing up front. But it might be worth picking apart?

Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon

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