*// sounding alarms But a software incident almost derailed the landing, as Hamilton recalled in a 2009 interview with MIT. “Everything was going according to plan until something totally unexpected happened, just as the astronauts were in the process of landing on the moon,” she recalled. “All of a sudden, the normal mission sequences were interrupted by priority displays of 1201 and 1202 alarms, giving the astronauts a go/no-go decision (to land or not to land),” she added. “It quickly became clear that the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it. With only minutes to spare, the decision was made to go for the landing.”
*// hamilton tech Also thanks to Hamilton and the work she led, notions of what humanity could do, and be, changed not just beyond the stratosphere but also here on the ground. Software engineering, a concept that Hamilton pioneered, has found its way from the moon landing to nearly every human endeavor. By the 1970s, Hamilton had moved on from NASA and the Apollo program. She went on to found and lead multiple software companies. Today her company, Hamilton Technologies, is just a few blocks away from MIT, where her career began—a hub of the code revolution that continues looking towards the stars to this day.
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While a decision was made in the moment to let the astronauts land, Hamilton pointed out that a fault analysis was done to see where the error was made. It turned out that the astronaut checklist, which governed the actions the crew had to do before landing, had the crew set the rendezvous radar hardware switch in the wrong position. This overloaded the central processing unit during the landing, but fortunately, the software recovered in the heated moments before Apollo 11 touched down.
Our astronauts didn’t have much time, but thankfully they had margaret hamilton.
Hamilton sits with some of her staff in the Scama room at MIT, while supporting the Apollo mission.
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