Margaret Hamilton: the woman who helped put man on the moon

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Margaret Hamilton was a trailblazer in her field, leading the team who developed the software for Nasa's Apollo missions. This was where the term "software engineering" was first coined. Margaret's work in the 1960s, ultimately enabled the astronauts on Apollo 11 to land on the moon. In 2016, Hamilton's life work was honoured by Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to science and space travel. Kevin Fong is the presenter of the podcast '13 minutes to the moon' which tells the story of the Apollo 11 mission. He explained to Matthew the significance of Margaret's work, and how it was put to the ultimate test just three minutes before the astronauts landed on the moon. The Bosnian Serb politician Biljana Plavšiċ, was the only woman to be charged with crimes against humanity for her role in the Balkans conflict of the 1990s. For nearly four years, she was vice-president of Republika Srpska, a Serb enclave in Bosnia that declared itself a separate state in 1992. It was the beginning of a program of brutal ethnic cleansing aimed at driving out Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs. The BBC's Allan Little reported from Bosnia throughout the conflict and interviewed Biljana Plavšiċ on a number of occasions. During the swinging 60s, Felicity Green was a trend-setting fashion editor at the Daily Mirror. She championed the work of many of the top young designers who made their names in that decade. In 1973 she became the first woman to sit on the board of a national newspaper and in later years went onto teach journalism at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Deborah Bee was a student of Felicity's in the 1980s, and they remained friends throughout the rest of her life. George Fenton was without doubt one of the UK’s, if not the world’s, most prolific and versatile film composers. He wrote scores for dozens of Hollywood blockbusters including Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons and Cry Freedom. He had long working relationships with directors like Richard Attenborough, Ken Loach and Nora Ephron. But he came back to the UK to play a significant part in the global success of the BBC’s natural history programmes narrated by Sir David Attenborough, including Blue Planet, Frozen Planet and Planet Earth. Alastair Fothergill was the the producer of those series for the BBC. Producer: Ed Prendeville Assistant Producer: Catherine Powell Researcher: Jesse Edwards Editor: Andrea Kennedy Archive: Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 11/05/2003; Blue Planet (Episode 1), BBC One, 24/09/2009; The Blue Planet (Series 1: Tidal Seas), BBC One, 29/09/2000; Bergerac (Series 4: The Last Interview), BBC One, 11/10/1985; Desert Island Discs (Cassandra Wilson), BBC Radio 4, 17/04/2011; Apollo 11 Archive, NASA; Apollo 8 Archive, NASA / Internet Archive; 13 Minutes to the Moon, BBC World Service / BBC Sounds; Oral History of Margaret Hamilton, Computer History Museum, Uploaded to Youtube.