Comment by jadamson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jadamson | Hacker News Reader

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Firstly, Apollo 8 was certainly manned, it just didn't land on the lunar surface.

Secondly, she was not a software director in 1965. In her own words:

> MARGARET HAMILTON: When I first got involved in Apollo, I was coming off the SAGE project for the Lincoln Labs. I was a young kid, and I was hired by Dan Lickly over here (pointing to Dan). And I was assigned, this was during the unmanned missions, and I was hired to do what they called programming, they also call it software engineering today, but not back then.

> One of my first assignments was to work on algorithms having to do with lunar landmark tables. So I wrote programs having to do with that area. Then there was an unmanned mission that was taking off, and people came running in to tell me that the lunar landmark tables were in upside down and backwards. This was just when the mission had just taken off. And I believed, until it landed, and heard on the news everything was okay, that I was in real trouble because I was involved with these algorithms.

> Then, because I was still a beginner, I was assigned responsibility for what was thought to be the least important software to be developed for the next mission. I was the most of the beginners; I mean, I was the first junior person, on this next unmanned mission

https://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/...

The unmanned flights she refers to would have been Apollo 4/5/6 test flights, so 1967/1968. Apollo software development started in 1961, she was still green in 1967. What exactly was she leading in 1965?

Apollo 1 launched in 1967, sure.

It was the first crewed Apollo mission (and a dry run that caught fire and killed the crew on the launch pad).

The Apollo program (aka Project Apollo) ran from 1961–1972 (oddly they didn't launch a crewed flight on the first day - go figure).

> and in her own words

(from my link | your link)

   this was during the unmanned missions,

ie. started before the Apollo 1 explosion in 1967.

Wikipedia has her work on SAGE ending in 1963, the Smithsoniam has her appointed director in 1965:

    Thanks to the success of her work at SAGE, she was the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT. In 1965, she became head of her own team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (later known as Draper Laboratory), which was dedicated to writing and testing software for Apollo 11’s two 70-pound computers—one aboard the command module, Columbia, and one aboard the lunar module, Eagle.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/marga...

I admit I fluffed something with the Apollo comment - I was reading multiple sources at the time and I guess I pulled that from the parent "yeah, no" link which was riddled with issues.

The unmanned Apollo missions were 4/5/6, after Apollo 1, not before it.

Hamilton's SAGE work ended 1963, Smithsonian asserts she started and later was promoted in 1965.

Your claim is that the Smithsoniam got this wrong?

Also: Had Hamilton been a rocket engineer and mentioned her work on engines for the unmanned flights .. that would easily place her work at or before 1963 .. long before the actual launch of the unmanned flights.

Mentioning her working of software for unmanned flights is more or less the same - this was the first time such software had been written and it took years to plan and get together - well before the actual date of use.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/60-years-ago-first-test-firing-...

By her own words, yes. I think the Smithsonian and Wikipedia are stuck in a game of telephone. Working on "the least important software" during the unmanned Apollo missions, but also already leading her own team by 1965 are clearly incompatible.

She also references lunar landmark tables, which wouldn't have been relevant until missions that started in '67-68, so she's not talking about earlier unmanned suborbital tests e.g. AS-201.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS-201

I can't find any primary source suggesting she worked there before then - her name doesn't start appearing in document dumps until January 1968, e.g.: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/links2.html

Maybe that's indicative of when she got promoted, but given that she painted herself as a complete newbie around the same time period, that's quite the career trajectory.

Page 19 of this:

http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf

from 1976 is likely as good as it gets without really diving deep.

It doesn't have hard dates on when software development started (but likely coincided with the early engine tests in the early 1960s)

It begins:

    The very early programs for the first few unmanned earth orbital test flights were each put together by a small dedicated group led by a chief engineer-programmer.

It then discusses many software components of getting a rocket from the earth to the moon and back again and the various people that did the over arching thrust of each software component.

It then moves on to say:

    Much of the detailed code of these programs was written by a team of specialists led by Margaret Hamilton.

    The task assignments to these individuals included, in addition to writing the code, the testing to certify that the program element met requirements.

    Overall testing of the assembled collection of program elements necessarily took the use of considerable human and machine resources.

So it's a big team effort (no surprise) taking many years, with key players for each component and a seperate group tying all the pieces together and bringing them to standard, to mesh well, and ironing out the hard stuff (fine details).

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