By: TOP500 Team

Elon Musk is shaking up both the car and space industries with his respective Tesla and SpaceX companies, and the irony is that while the former is totally upending the combustion engine for land transportation with zippy and stylish electric cars, the latter company has to not only embrace but to create new combustion technologies to get a manned mission to Mars as Musk not only dreams of doing, but is making happen.

Getting a small group of human beings to Mars and back is no easy task, we learned at the recent GPU Technology Conference in San Jose hosted graphics chip and accelerator maker Nvidia. One of the problems with such a mission is that you need a very large and efficient rocket engine to get the amount of material into orbit for the mission, explained Adam Lichtl, who is director of research at SpaceX and who with a team of a few dozen programmers is try to crack the particularly difficult task of better simulating the combustion inside of a rocket engine. You need a large engine to shorten the trip to Mars, too.

Read the full article on The Platform.