Cool. I'm going to go with NASA, MIT, Wired[0], and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory History of Apollo On-Board Guidance, Navigation, and Control[1] as my sources of information on this one.
This argument probably should be settled by primary documents like contemporary Apollo org charts and development milestone reports rather than modern press releases.
I can do one better; the source code itself, which has been scanned (https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11), lists Margaret Hamilton as "COLOSSUS programming leader" - COLOSSUS being the command module software - as of March 28, 1969, reporting to Dan Lickly - Director of Mission Program Development, i.e. in charge of software development at this point, and Richard Battin - Director of Mission Development, who was basically the technical lead of the AGC project at that point. There are also some other senior scientists on the approver list, but those two are the senior software leaders. So Margaret Hamilton was not in charge of the software development team as of March 1969 (she was still in charge of the COLOSSUS module), and in fact not until Dan Lickly left the project, which I think happened around the Apollo 11 flight.
It should be needless to point out that the AGC software was complete and frozen at this point, although bug fixes and some minor features made it in.
This doesn't stop misinformation from appearing all over the place, e.g. Wikipedia says "Details of these programs [LUMINARY and COLOSSUS] were implemented by a team under the direction of Margaret Hamilton", but this is false, as we've seen - LUMINARY, the moon landing software, was frozen while Hamilton was still on the COLOSSUS project. Also, if you root around the history of COLOSSUS itself - which I did at some point - you'll see that Margaret Hamilton became its programming leader in 1968, after COLOSSUS was complete.
Sure. Quoting from the History of Apollo On-Board Guidance, Navigation, and Control (David G. Hoag, 1976):
"Each of these later [complex manned] missions was assigned the responsibility of a senior engineer who assumed a more technical management role for the program....Names notable here are Dr. James Miller for the first Lunar Module program SUNBURST, Dr. Frederic Martin for the Command Module program COLOSSUS, and George Cherry for the Lunar Module program LUMINARY. These last two were the programs used for the lunar landing missions....
"Much of the detailed code of these programs was written by a team of specialists led by Margaret Hamilton. The tasks assignments to these individuals included, in addition to writing the code, the testing to certify that the program element met requirements."
DashRattlesnake|9 years ago
yaakov34|9 years ago
It should be needless to point out that the AGC software was complete and frozen at this point, although bug fixes and some minor features made it in.
This doesn't stop misinformation from appearing all over the place, e.g. Wikipedia says "Details of these programs [LUMINARY and COLOSSUS] were implemented by a team under the direction of Margaret Hamilton", but this is false, as we've seen - LUMINARY, the moon landing software, was frozen while Hamilton was still on the COLOSSUS project. Also, if you root around the history of COLOSSUS itself - which I did at some point - you'll see that Margaret Hamilton became its programming leader in 1968, after COLOSSUS was complete.
gemma|9 years ago
"Each of these later [complex manned] missions was assigned the responsibility of a senior engineer who assumed a more technical management role for the program....Names notable here are Dr. James Miller for the first Lunar Module program SUNBURST, Dr. Frederic Martin for the Command Module program COLOSSUS, and George Cherry for the Lunar Module program LUMINARY. These last two were the programs used for the lunar landing missions....
"Much of the detailed code of these programs was written by a team of specialists led by Margaret Hamilton. The tasks assignments to these individuals included, in addition to writing the code, the testing to certify that the program element met requirements."