The Woman in the Moon: How Margaret Hamilton Helped Fly the First Astronauts to the Moon
by Richard Maurer
Intermediate, Middle School    Roaring Brook    272 pp.
3/23    9781626728561    $19.99
e-book ed.  9781626728578    $10.99

Maurer shines a deserved spotlight on Margaret Hamilton, whose computer code for the Apollo program was integral to the success of the 1969 moonshot. Readers meet her as a child in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she was brought up to be “curious, diligent, fearless, and a bit of a rebel”; her path eventually led to her joining the Instrumentation Lab at MIT. It was there that Hamilton helped write the code for the onboard ­computer, the Apollo ­Guidance Computer, that would ­control the astronauts’ flight through space. ­Maurer draws on numerous ­personal interviews with Hamilton to reveal her character; she comes across as determined, brilliant, and confident yet self-effacing. Maurer mirrors her ­methodical ­competence, weaving into his account contextualizing information about early computer science and the technological innovations that made the Apollo program possible. He details the f­unctioning—and malfunctioning—of the AGC drive, the excitement of the test flights, and then Apollo 11 itself. Archival illustrations further enliven the narrative; a 1969 publicity photo of Hamilton steadying a tower of printed-out code is as effective now as it was then. A timeline, thorough source notes, an extensive bibliography, photo credits, and an index (unseen) round out this valuable addition to books about the space program.

From the March/April 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.