Programmer behind first moon landing dead

Margaret Hamilton was born in 1936 and became a pioneering programmer and computer scientist. She is best known for leading the work on the software for the Apollo program, which led to the United States becoming the first country in the world to send humans to the moon.

She worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1959 and the mid-1970s. Among other things, she contributed to software for the US defense. In 1965, she saw a newspaper ad where MIT was looking for people who wanted to develop software to "send a man to the moon".

MIT had then been commissioned by NASA to create the software needed for the Apollo program. She applied, got the job and became the first female programmer in the project.

After working on the software for the first unmanned Apollo missions, she was promoted to lead the development of those needed for the manned missions. In 1968, as Neil Armstrong's first trip to the moon approached, she had become responsible for leading the more than 400 people who worked on programming for the project, writes MIT.

- From my perspective, the software itself - designing it, programming it, further developing it, seeing it work and learning from it - was at least as exciting as everything else around the project, she has said about her work.

- We would never get a second chance. We knew that.

Hamilton also became a prominent computer scientist in academia with over 130 publications. She contributed to making software development its own academic discipline, writes MIT.

In 2016, Margaret Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.

- Her software architecture enabled enormous progress for humanity; she wrote the code that helped the United States set foot on the moon, President Barack Obama said at the time.

Margaret Hamilton died on September 30, aged 90.