Name: How one woman put man on the moon - Matt Porter & Margaret Hamilton
Uploaded: 2020-03-22T07:40:13.000Z
Duration: 5 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

mankind was just minutes away  from landing on the surface of the moon.

But before the astronauts  began their final descent,

Back on Earth, Margaret Hamilton  held her breath.

She'd led the team developing  the pioneering in-flight software,

so she knew this mission  had no room for error.

But the nature  of this last-second emergency

would soon prove her software  was working exactly as planned.

Born 33 years earlier in Paoli, Indiana,  Hamilton had always been inquisitive.

In college, she studied mathematics and philosophy,

before taking a research position at the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Here, she encountered her first computer while developing software

to support research  into the new field of chaos theory.

Hamilton developed software  for America’s first air defense system

But when she heard  that renowned engineer Charles Draper

was looking for help  sending mankind to the moon,

NASA looked to Draper and his group  of over 400 engineers

to invent the first compact  digital flight computer,

this device would be responsible  for guiding, navigating

At a time when unreliable computers  filled entire rooms,

the AGC needed to operate  without any errors,

one for designing hardware  and one for developing software.

Hamilton led the team that built  the on-board flight software

This work, for which she coined the term “software engineering,"

Human lives were on the line,  so every program had to be perfect.

Margaret’s software needed to quickly detect unexpected errors

But this kind of adaptable program  was difficult to build,

since early software could only process  jobs in a predetermined order.

Margaret designed her program  to be “asynchronous,”

meaning the software's more important jobs would interrupt less important ones.

Her team assigned every task  a unique priority

to ensure that each job  occurred in the correct order

and at the right time— regardless of any surprises.

Margaret realized her software  could help the astronauts work

that would interrupt  astronaut’s regularly scheduled tasks

The astronaut could then communicate with Mission Control

This marked the first time flight software communicated directly—

It was these fail safes that triggered  the alarms just before the lunar landing.

Buzz Aldrin quickly realized his mistake—

he’d inadvertently flipped  the rendezvous radar switch.

This radar would be essential  on their journey home,

but here it was using up  vital computational resources.

Fortunately, the Apollo Guidance Computer was well equipped to manage this.

During the overload,  the software restart programs

allowed only the highest priority jobs  to be processed—

including the programs  necessary for landing.

The Priority Displays  gave the astronauts a choice—

With minutes to spare,  Mission Control gave the order.

The Apollo 11 landing was about  the astronauts, Mission Control,

software and hardware all working together as an integrated system of systems.

Hamilton’s contributions were essential to the work of engineers and scientists

inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s  goal to reach the Moon.

And her life-saving work  went far beyond Apollo 11—

no bugs were ever found in the in-flight software for any crewed Apollo missions.

Hamilton founded a company that uses  its unique universal systems language

to create breakthroughs  for systems and software.

In 2003, NASA honored her achievements  with the largest financial award

And 47 years after her software first guided astronauts to the moon,

Hamilton was awarded  the Presidential Medal of Freedom

for changing the way we think  about technology.