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Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions at MIT, has died aged 90. She is widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering' and later founded companies building programming systems used in aerospace, defence and other industries.
Sierra Space, a Sierra Nevada Corporation subsidiary, conducted two high-altitude balloon drop tests of its Ghost reentry vehicle, releasing it from 35,000 and 68,500 feet carrying a bottle of whiskey and a software-defined radio. The tests, part of U.S. Space Command's Apollo Nexus training exercise, mark the vehicle's first trial in two years and aimed to show that liquids and electronics could survive reentry and landing intact.
Margaret Hamilton, who led the team writing onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo lunar missions and helped establish software engineering as a discipline, has died at 90. She worked at MIT from 1959 into the mid-1970s before founding her own software companies, and authored more than 130 publications over her career.
Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term 'software engineering' and led development of NASA's Apollo on-board flight software in the 1960s, has died at age 90. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and was later depicted as a LEGO minifig in the 'Women of NASA' set alongside astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride.
Margaret Hamilton, who directed the software development team for NASA’s Apollo program at MIT, passed away on September 30 at age 90. She was instrumental in establishing software engineering as a formal discipline and authored over 130 publications. Her work earned her numerous awards, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom, recognizing her role in enabling humans to land on the moon.
SpaceX is reportedly negotiating with Apollo Capital Management and several banks to arrange financing for a $40 billion purchase of Nvidia GPUs, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The financing would largely rely on investment-grade debt markets, with the GPUs likely serving as collateral, just months after SpaceX raised $25 billion in bonds following its June IPO.
NASA is moving thousands of contractor jobs, many in roles like Mission Control, into civil servant positions. The shift revisits a practice from the Apollo era, when such roles were staffed directly by NASA employees rather than outside firms. Former flight director Gerry Griffin recalled that during Apollo missions, NASA retained direct responsibility for mission-critical roles, a practice that eroded over subsequent decades, notably during the space shuttle program.
Milt Windler, one of four Mission Control flight directors during the Apollo 13 crisis in 1970, has died at age 94, according to a family notice posted online. He joined NASA as a flight director in 1968, leading shifts for Apollo 8's lunar orbit, Apollo 10, the Apollo 12, 14 and 15 moon landings, and all three crewed Skylab missions.
EliseAI, an AI startup automating administrative work for housing and healthcare companies, raised $350 million in a round that doubled its valuation to $4 billion from its Series E last August. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Ventures. The company says its software is used in one of every six US apartments and recently surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.
The Austrian Academy of Science, working with French AI lab Mistral and tech firm Sail Reply, has released Apollo, described as the first large language model built specifically for Ancient Greek. Trained on roughly 600 million words from manuscripts, papyri and inscriptions, it will be offered free to scholars through a chatbot interface to help them locate relevant fragments and reconstruct damaged texts.
NASA and IBM have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system that merges decades of US and Japanese lunar mission data into a single unified map. It is the first model of its kind to combine multiple imaging types, viewing angles, and scales of the Moon's surface into one adaptable framework, similar to earlier Earth and Sun models built by the same partnership.
A newly compiled digital archive collects colour gradient schemes intended for cartography, technical illustration and design work. The collection is organized by author, supports multiple file formats, and includes examples ranging from rainfall maps of the Caribbean to aeromagnetic imagery of Western Australia and lunar surface maps. Full gradient sets are available for download.