New heroes of spaceflight: Not the astronauts but the software nerds

Apart from her work for Apollo, she also coined the term “software engineer”…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...

I think sw engs have always played a large part in the success of space missions, including emergencies. Even the apollo and early unmanned missions would have been disasters without sw engs finding ways to just get things working.

This article sounds a bit incoherent and under-researched.

Software “nerds” were the unsung heroes from the very early days of spaceflight. A good book on the involvement of software engineers during the Apollo Program is Mindell’s “Digital Apollo”.

Honestly, a light fluff piece without any real insights or actual content.

SpaceX doesn’t value their software engineers enough. They are paid lower than top-market salaries and then put through the grinder. This is well known in the industry. Most people leave at the 5 year mark when the vesting cliff is over, if they aren’t stack-ranked out before that. Lovely work environment.

Also, when you see the mission control room in Hawthorne, during a live webcast, there are several rows of engineers overseeing the mission and only 2-3 of those are for software.

Software is for sure an important part of the picture but the bytes don’t put themselves into orbit.

Also, I resent the “nerd” name-calling.