Margaret Hamilton, MIT computing pioneer who led Apollo flight software teams that helped land humans on the moon, dies at 90

Margaret Hamilton, the MIT software engineer who led development of the Apollo program’s onboard flight software, has died at 90. Her teams built the code for the Lunar Module and Command and Service Module, work that became foundational to modern software engineering.

Hamilton’s legacy underscores how mission-critical software moved from a supporting role to a core engineering discipline. Her Apollo work helped establish practices around reliability, fault tolerance, and human-computer interaction that still shape safety-critical systems today.