Margaret is a young woman working at MIT. Amid a time of great innovation in space travel, she's hard at work in the mathematics department, working in the emerging field of software engineering. She and her colleagues are working on the software for NASA, having worked her way up from her initial application for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Building her team from the ground up, she earns the respect of those she works with, though she's still mistaken for a secretary. But when NASA's Apollo 8 mission goes awry, it's up to her and her team's programming abilities to save the astronauts stranded in space.