Re:Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed ...
by jadamson on Friday July 14, 2023 @06:56AM
(#36722142)
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.
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.
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.