It’s worth noting that this tweet thread makes some major mistakes, both in dates and in roles. For example, while she was hired by NASA after Apollo 8, she had already been working in a substantial capacity on Apollo software at the Draper lab at mit, which was contracted/hired to do the work. Much of the software written for and by NASA at that time was not actually written by engineers under NASA’s employ.

Which is to say, by the time, NASA hired her she had been working on the software for many years. And, additionally, she had been working on similar software even before that!

I think that it would be safe to describe that Twitter thread as suffering from a deviation from reality.

The onboard flight software (OFS) has many components, and, the OFS was originally built at Draper/MIT for the Apollo. (Draper also contributed to the Space Shuttle software).

As in Unix, core OS components are used by other software components; in this case, Hal Laning's OS/executive was used by the guidance software (Hamilton's team). No, she didn't write all the guidance code, the team did. No she didn't write the executive/OS, but the guidance software used the executive. All the visibility she got about saving the mission is because the process overruns that caused the infamous alarms occurred during the lunar descent phase of the mission.

In the Twitter thread it reads as if Hal Laning was never recognized. But he was, many times, and received awards and made great contributions. Even the Space Shuttle programming language called Hal/S (which I used during my Shuttle days), was named in Hal Laning's honor.

It's striking how many of liberalism's most cherished myths are revealed as complete fraud when the slightest scrutiny is applied