Breaking Barriers to the Moon and Back:
How Margaret Hamilton's Software Sent
Men to the Moon
As a Woman
Data from SP-4012 Nasa Historical Data Book: Volume IV Nasa Resources 1969-1978.
Chart by Marisa Triola, 2020.
"Programming was never considered to be women’s work, at least not in any of the many projects I have been involved with. Human computers [who did calculations by hand] were mostly all women and there were women who used calculating machines – like the Marchant machines – but they weren’t programmers. They didn’t write software. When I first came to Apollo, there were no other women writing software. Then 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."
-Margaret Hamilton
Weaving the core ropes at the Raytheon plant in suburban. Boston. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. No date.
Not all women contributing to Project Apollo worked for NASA. For example, “little old ladies,” as Hamilton called them, worked in plants threading core ropes to recreate programmers’ code.
Core Ropes. (S)hero Margaret Hamilton. No date.
Margaret Hamilton was the first—and sometimes the only—female software engineer working on Project Apollo. Those who doubted Margaret Hamilton’s capabilities had never seen her brilliance first-hand. Hamilton’s team immediately recognized her as the most capable software engineer among them. Before long, they included her in their jokes and parties, and Hamilton described feeling like “one of the guys.”
Margaret Hamilton's Team, Apollo 17. We Hack the Moon. No date.
Margaret Hamilton with her daugher, Lauren. Oddesy. No date.
Being a mother never held Hamilton back. In fact, it helped her as an engineer. On weekends and evenings, she took her daughter, Lauren, to work. One day, as Lauren was playing “astronaut” with the flight simulator, she selected a pre-launch program which crashed the simulator mid-flight. Hamilton’s superiors didn’t think well-trained astronauts would make that error. However, after Jim Lovell made Lauren’s exact mistake during Apollo 8, Hamilton's team fixed the so-called “Lauren bug” and her superiors learned to trust Hamilton’s instincts.