Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton Margaret Hamilton is an American computer scientist and systems engineer who led the team that developed the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo missions, writing the code that landed humans on the Moon in 1969. Her software prevented a catastrophic abort during the actual Apollo 11 landing by detecting and ignoring overload alarms, a crisis her team had anticipated and programmed for during testing. She pioneered the concept of "software engineering" as a discipline deserving the same rigor as other engineering fields, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.