Margaret Hamilton, who led a software team for NASA’s Apollo program, dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, a groundbreaking computer scientist who led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA’s moon-bound Apollo program and later in life was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology, has died. She was 90. Hamilton died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, told The Associated Press on Thursday. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that her work helped make humanity’s first journeys to the moon possible. “To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement,” Olivier de Weck, the Apollo program professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and interim head of its aeronautics and astronautics department, told MIT News, a publication of the university’s communications office.