What We Know About Margaret Hamilton's Death at 90

Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the team that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions, died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 90. Her daughter, Lauren Hamilton, confirmed the death to The Associated Press, which first reported it Oct. 8, according to the wire story carried by ABC News.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on the social platform X that Hamilton's work helped make humanity's first journeys to the moon possible, the AP reported.

When and where did Margaret Hamilton die?

Hamilton died Sept. 30 at a hospital in Cambridge, the same city where she worked for decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her daughter told the AP. News of the death became public Oct. 8, when the wire service's obituary ran. No cause of death was reported in the AP account.

What did she do for NASA's Apollo program?

Hamilton joined MIT's Instrumentation Lab in the mid-1960s, when the lab held a NASA contract tied to the Apollo program, according to MIT News, cited in the AP report. She first worked on software for uncrewed missions before moving to the team that built onboard flight software for the crewed Apollo flights. By 1968, she had been named assistant director in charge of the command and service module team — the software that flew astronauts to the moon and back, per the same account.

A photo that circulated widely online in recent years shows Hamilton in her early 30s standing beside a stack of printed code pages used by her team during the Apollo project, the AP noted.

How did Hamilton get into computer science?

Hamilton graduated with a mathematics degree from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, in 1958 and went to work for MIT in 1959, according to MIT News. Her early assignments there included building weather-prediction software alongside a meteorology professor before she moved into the Instrumentation Lab's Apollo work.

"We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s," Hamilton told MIT News in 2009, according to the AP. "Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure."

How are NASA and MIT responding to her death?

Olivier de Weck, the Apollo program professor at MIT and interim head of the university's aeronautics and astronautics department, gave MIT News a statement that the AP quoted in full:

"To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved."

Isaacman's statement on X credited her work with helping make the Apollo moon landings possible, though the AP did not publish his remarks as a direct quote.

How is Hamilton remembered today?

Hamilton's profile grew well beyond engineering circles in the years before her death. A Lego set honoring women of NASA, unveiled in 2017, included a minifigure of her. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in 2019 brought another wave of attention, her daughter told the AP.

"She definitely went from nobody knowing who she was to suddenly everyone knowing who she was, especially in her field," Lauren Hamilton said, according to the AP. "And I think she was really happy to be acknowledged for what she did. But she was kind of a reserved person so the spotlight wasn't necessarily a natural thing for her."

Hamilton told MIT News in 2009 that the team operated with unusual latitude for the era. "Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom" — a line the AP cited as part of the same 2009 interview, without the rest of the sentence appearing in the available report.

Full details on funeral arrangements were not included in the AP's initial report. Readers can follow the originating AP account via ABC News for updates as MIT and NASA release further statements.

Artiglio is A coming-soon iPhone chief of staff for briefings and drafts. Not on the App Store yet.