Current and future space missions demand highly reliable on-board computing systems, which are capable of carrying out high-performance data processing. At present, no single computing scheme satisfies both, the highly reliable operation requirement and the high-performance computing requirement. The aim of this paper is to review existing systems and offer a new approach to addressing the problem. In the first part of the paper, a detailed survey of fault-tolerant distributed computing systems for space applications is presented. Fault types and assessment criteria for fault-tolerant systems are introduced. Redundancy schemes for distributed systems are analyzed. A review of the state-of-the-art on fault-tolerant distributed systems is presented and limitations of current approaches are discussed. In the second part of the paper, a new fault-tolerant distributed computing platform with wireless links among the computing nodes is proposed. Novel algorithms, enabling important aspects of the architecture, such as time slot priority adaptive fault tolerant channel access and fault-tolerant distributed computing using task migration are introduced. (C) 2016 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.