The Woman Behind the First Manned “Journey to the Moon”

 Margaret Hamilton
 The Woman Behind the First Manned “Journey to the Moon” 

Background

 “We choose to go to the Moon''. These words by the then US president John F. Kennedy, addressing the crowd of prestigious Rice University in 1962, was no sort of relief for Americans who feared the overwhelming Soviet Union and the US falling short in what was to be ‘first’ to land man on the moon.

Soon after, the courageous and ambitious ‘Journey to the moon’ had its first dedicated mission ‘The Apollo Program’ which despite initially being destined for a trip to Mercury shifted its ambitions a little close to the earth, the lunar surface. The Apollo program, by NASA, was successful in landing the first Manned spacecraft on the Lunar surface just 7 years after its rejuvenation under President John F. Kennedy. The first Lunar module landed the likes of Neil Armstrong, Micheal Collins, and Edwin Aldrin but little do they know the mind behind the software that orchestrated the module. To the surprise of many, the software that landed the first man on the moon was led by a young woman in her early thirties, Margaret Hamilton.

Margaret started doing her undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Michigan. Later, she moved to a more known environment to her at Earlham University and got her BA in mathematics and a minor degree from the very place. Her time at Earlham saw her not only doing mathematics but ace it. Her keen interest in self-learning and unmatched curiosity earned her a place at MIT Department of Meteorology where she programmed a software that could predict weather and contributed a major part in Chaos theory, a mathematical study of chaos. Later, she moved to MIT Lincoln’s Lab and joined the team of intellectuals working on SAGE, an approach based on linking data from various radars to form a clear image of a widely covered Airspace.

An excellent mathematician, a charismatic and innovative personality who devoted an absolute will to self-learning and the creation, a no unfamiliar trait of hers to everyone, secured her a place in the Apollo Mission. Though she had her first work in programming, she was handed a promotion to a more prominent team who had the responsibility of the overall design of the lunar module. Her growth mentality and a resemblance of a leader got recognized soon, as she went on to take charge of all Command Module software — a software that would navigate and guide the land on the lunar crust. Eventually, Hamilton and her team designed software that would take control of the in-flight experience. It is worth noting the fact that this was during the time when ‘software engineering’ did not exist.

The most notable trait of Margaret was her out-of-the-box thinking. Margaret had been credited to what was Apollo 1’s major dissimilarity with the previous models, a powerful software that could prioritize errors on its own. During her time at SAGE, she designed a system that used sound as an error detector. In such a mission, where even the slimmest margin of error could result in a halt of years of hard work, the role of Margaret’s own debugging technique came to life. In an incident during her time at one of the labs at MIT, Hamilton realized a mistake in the system when her daughter would play ‘astronaut’ and push a simulator button that would crash the whole system. During the previous mission of Apollo to orbit around the moon, astronaut Jim Lowell made the exact same mistake as her daughter and fortunately Hamilton and her team fixed it within hours. Slowing and gradually the Lunar triumph mission was molding into a shape.

During the climax of things, 3 minutes before the landing, the system triggered a set of alarms. Hamilton had a plan for this: replace normal displays with “priority displays” when the system had to encounter a bunch of errors at a time. So, the computer could not complete all the tasks at once, and prioritizing and postponing was the best approach. ‘Because of the flight software's system-software's error detection and recovery techniques that included its system-wide "kill and recompute" from a "safe place" restart approach to its snapshot and rollback techniques, the Display Interface Routines (AKA the priority displays) together with its man-in-the-loop capabilities were able to be created in order to have the capability to interrupt the astronauts' normal mission displays with priority displays of critical alarms in case of an emergency. This depended on our assigning a unique priority to every process in the software in order to ensure that all of its events would take place in the correct order and at the right time relative to everything else that was going on.’ Just before the landing took place, the astronauts’ normal displays were replaced by “priority alarm displays.” There was a state of emergency with a go/no-go decision to be made. On-board computer engineer shouted, “Go,go!” and they continued. Hamilton later wrote of the incident: “The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, 'I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks'; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ... If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.” Margaret Hamilton was one of the leading figures behind Apollo 11’s lunar triumph. Her Anticipation of the situation made sure that the landing was obvious and safe. Her colleague Paul Curto even went on to say that Hamilton’s work was “the foundation for ultra-reliable software design".Also, Margaret, along with Anthony Oettinger and Barry Boehm, has been credited with naming the discipline of “software engineering. Engineering then was considered to be a workplace for only men and even as now, women doing mathematics and science is a fancy thing for society. At a very young age, she went to orchestrate one of the most notable achievements in the history of Mankind and that saw her win the highest order civilian award in the US, the Medal of Freedom, in 2016. Margaret was the woman behind what the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, quotes“one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Fig: Young Margaret with the codes of Programme that landed the first human on the moon.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/margaret-hamilton-led-nasa-softw are-team-landed-astronauts-moon-180971575/

-Deepak Woli