Many of us are familiar with the picture of Apollo programmer Margaret Hamilton (left) and a stack of all the code written for that program.

For the upcoming Monday launch of the Artemis I mission back to the moon, there are also dedicated women engineering and programming the mission.

In the picture on the right are five women at Marshall Space Flight Center who engineered NASA’s return to the Moon with flight software that will control the rocket for Artemis missions. From left to right, Shawna Broussard, Shaun Phillips, Linda Brewster, Deanna Whitehead, and Marlyn Terek, pictured at Marshall in front of a solid rocket booster that was used in NASA’s space shuttle era.

Brewster manages the Integrated Avionics Test Facility where thousands of simulated SLS flights have been flown to test the flight software along with the avionics and flight computers that are critical to launch success. She remembers watching Apollo flights as a child and NASA landing men on the Moon and welcomes the opportunity to work on a mission that will return NASA to the Moon, laying the foundation for future missions to Mars.

“Being a part of the SLS mission and landing the first woman on the Moon is a childhood dream come true,” Brewster said.

The team implemented and tested required capabilities for the software. The software’s development and testing included the successful Green Run test of SLS in March 2021. Each test enables the engineers to learn more about the system and what modifications are needed. Testing has verified more than 1,000 requirements for the system.

It is about 50,000 lines of unique code for the core stage flight computers with another 50,000 lines or so of code that is standard.

You can read more about the women above in the article here.

If you are interested, see the SLS Reference Guide on flight software testing and development.

Article by Anne Barela, selected as a Digital Creator to cover the Artemis I launch at Kennedy Space Center. She’s also an engineer at Adafruit Industries and a space enthusiast living in Florida. This article may be reprinted with attribution and link back to this post.