SpaceX's workhouse Falcon 9 rocket, which flew NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station, is powered by liquid oxygen, rocket-grade kerosene, and Linux. //

Usually, though, chips that go into space aren't ordinary chips. CPUs that stay in space must be radiation-hardened. Otherwise, they tend to fail due to the effects of ionizing radiation and cosmic rays. These customized processors undergo years of design work and then more years of testing before they are certified for spaceflight. For instance, NASA expects its next-generation, general-purpose processor, an ARM A53 variant you may know from the Raspberry Pi 3, to be ready to run in 2021. Because the first stage of the Falcon 9 lands itself, its chips don't need to be radiation hardened. //

Why three processors? That's because, as explained on StackExchange Space Exploration, SpaceX uses an Actor-Judge system to provide safety through redundancy. In this system, every time a decision is made, it's compared to the results from the other cores. If there's any disagreement, the decision is thrown out and the process is restarted. It's only when every processor comes up with the same answer that a command is sent to the PowerPC microcontrollers.

These controllers, which call the shots for the rocket engines and grid fins, get three commands from each of the x86 processors. If all three command strings are identical, then the microcontroller executes the command, but if one of the three is bad, the controller goes with the last previously correct instruction. If things go completely awry, the Falcon 9 ignores the misfiring chip's commands. //

The point of this triple "tell-me three times" redundancy is to give the fault tolerance it needs without having to pay for expensive space-specific chips. Modern planes, like the newer Airbus planes, use a similar approach in their fly-by-wire systems. //

The Dragon spacecraft also runs Linux with flight software written in C++. The ship's touchscreen interface is rendered using Chromium and JavaScript. If something were to go wrong with the interface, the astronauts have physical buttons to control the spacecraft.
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So, thanks in part to Linux, we've returned to manned spaceflight in the US. And, this it seems penguins can fly, with sufficient rocket power behind them.