Space exploration company SpaceX relies almost entirely on standard, off-the-shelf Linux operating systems to run the flight controls for their wildly expensive Falcon 9 rockets.

A closer look

Space exploration company SpaceX relies almost entirely on standard, off-the-shelf Linux operating systems to run the flight controls for their wildly expensive Falcon 9 rockets. Instead of spending billions developing a proprietary, highly classified software environment from scratch, they just use a stripped-down version of the exact same open-source software that computer science students install on their old laptops to feel like hackers. The flight computers run a custom C++ program overlaid on Linux, relying on triple redundancy to ensure the rocket doesn't violently explode if a single processor encounters an error. It is somewhat horrifying to realize that humanity's current frontier of space travel is actively powered by the same free operating system running your smart refrigerator