Flight critical subsystems in aerospace vehicles must achieves probability of failure rates of less than 1 failure in 109 flight hours (i.e. less than 1 failure per 100,000 years of operation). Systems that achieve this level of reliability are hard to design, hard to verify, and hard to validate, especially if software is involved. In this talk, I will talk about some of the challenges that the aerospace community faces in designing systems with this level of reliability and how it is (beginning) to approach them. We leverage results from the computer science, robotics and controls communities to develop methods and tools for designing control policies, specifying the properties of the resulting distributed embedded system and the physical environment, and proving that the specifications are met. Application areas include autonomous driving, vehicle management systems and distributed multi-agent systems.