Page 67 - All About History - Issue 180-19

Women Of Apollo
I was at home resting! I was a return to Earth
specialist and you’re not going to bring them back
from the Moon to the Earth whenever you got two
astronauts on the surface of the Moon. In the end,
I probably did worse than everybody else because
at the time, I had like an 11 inch a little portable
black and white TV!
What can you remember from the
moment of the landing?
Well, the images at the time were pretty terrible, I
don’t really remember very much about what I saw,
I was mainly listening to the audio. It was sitting
there holding your breath, wondering if they were
going to land or not because they were having a
little bit of fuel problems going down. President
Kennedy said we were to land on the Moon and
return back to Earth – I never disconnected those.
I only considered it a success if we did both of
those things, it wouldn’t be a success if they landed
and they didn’t get home.
You also helped to bring the astronauts
of Apollo 13 safely home after one of
their oxygen tanks exploded. What was
the atmosphere like during that time?
It was a very tense time at the control centre for
everyone because we had a mission that was
definitely endangered. I think the biggest concern
was that no one knew how serious the damage to
the spacecraft was. When you’ve had a major loss
like that, you don’t know what else might have
been affected and that suspense was certainly a
concern to everybody. But again, when you work
on a mission, part of what you learn to do is you
learn to focus and compartmentalise, you’ve got to
do your job and do your job correctly. In terms of
the return to Earth, our program worked great, it
did everything it was supposed to do.
It must have been a great feeling to know
your program worked successfully?
Northcutt and her team
worked on bringing the Apollo
13 astronauts home in 1970
Northcutt was the first
woman to work as an
n
engineer for NASA’s s
mission contro ol
The famous photo
of Hamilton
standing next to
the listings of the
Apollo software
It was a great feeling to know that we knew how
to deal with that problem. I think Apollo 13 was
the most successful lunar mission because it
showed even though we didn’t accomplish all of
the mission goals, we accomplished the main goal,
which was to get them home safely.
Do you have any advice for young girls
and women thinking of going into the
STEM fields today?
I still talk to girls that tell me a lot, ‘I’m not good
at math.’ I hope they take part of what President
Kennedy said to heart, because I think it’s truly
the overriding lesson from Apollo, which is to do it
because it’s hard, not because it’s easy.
MARGARET
HAMILTON
Hamilton’s pioneering efforts
helped to put man on the Moon
As the lead software engineer of the Apollo
programme, Margaret Hamilton’s work was
critical to the success of Apollo 11. Working as
a computer programmer at MIT, Hamilton was
the first one hired to develop the onboard
flight software for the Apollo spacecraft
after MIT was awarded the contract. With
computer science in its infancy, there was
no rule book to follow, leaving Hamilton
and her team to solve any problems as they
went along – she coined the term ‘software
engineering’ to define their work.
A working mother, she brought her
daughter, Lauren, along with her to the lab on
weeknights and weekends. Hamilton would
run numerous simulations to test the software
she was developing and in one instance,
Lauren crashed the simulation after trying to
copy her mother. Realising that the astronauts
could make a similar mistake, Hamilton fought
NASA and MIT to have code added to the
software to account for human error.
Her determination paid off, when the
computers of Apollo 11’s lunar module became
overloaded as it approached the Moon’s
surface, dealing with more commands than
it could handle. However, Hamilton had
programmed the software to prioritise tasks
in order of importance and with confidence
in her work, Mission Control gave the orders
for the astronauts to proceed, leading to a
successful landing and Neil Armstrong’s first
steps on the Moon.
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