Margaret Hamilton's Code SAVED the Moon Landing With Seconds to Spare

Three minutes before the first moon landing, alarms screamed across the cockpit, and one woman's code saved everything.

Margaret Hamilton was a young mother who often brought her little daughter to the lab on nights and weekends.

She wrote software for NASA back when software was barely considered real engineering at all.

In fact, she coined the very phrase we now use every day: software engineering.

Her team hand-wrote the flight code that would guide Apollo 11 down to the lunar surface.

As the lander dropped, the overloaded computer flashed alarm after alarm, seconds from giving out.

But Hamilton had built it to shed less important tasks and protect the landing above all.

Instead of crashing, the computer steadied itself, and the astronauts touched down safely on the moon.

Her printed stack of code once stood in a photo as tall as she was.

The woman who named software engineering had quietly carried humanity to another world.

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