Because all of it is expected and known. It would actually be a lot harder to calculate if it were something taking place just here on earth. You have to factor in stuff like wind and turbulence which throws calculations off. But in space? Little to no unexpected variables. It's Newton's first law; an object in motion stays in motion.

We know the position of the moon and how it will move.

We know the position of the earth and how it will move.

We know the position of the spacecraft and how it will move.

From there, it's just math.

It took us a few thousand years to figure it out. No biggie.

I want to upvote you 100 times

I heard Neil DeWeed Tyson explain they only use pi a few digits out though because it doesn’t need to be that specific… let me see if I can find the video.

Found this not looking for the video now lol

Gneiss.

So metal

And rocks are toys, so science is toys

Predicting weather is chaos theory.

Predicting the movement of celestial bodies is classical mechanics.

To be fair, weather has a web of complex and confounding variables vis a vie every fucking air molecule in the entire atmosphere.

Where as Orion was a single shippy boi

Math, or at least this part of it, is all about relationships between values. Let's ignore numbers for a bit. If you take a long stick and put a big rock under it, then when you move your side of the stick down, the other side will move up. And if you were to measure how much you moved your side versus how much the other side moved, you'd notice that unless you put the rock right in the dead middle, the other side would move a different amount. This isn't because something is magically making this happen, it just a property of the construction of your system. The other side just does move more or less, and it's different depending on where the pivot point is.

Similarly, if you have two gear wheels with different numbers of teeth, and you mesh them together, and you turn one and count how many times you've turned it, and also count how far the other one has turned, you'll find a relationship there too! And again, this relationship is just built into the way these objects interact. It's just the way this system works.

Okay, so, stay with me now, saying y = 2x + 5 is the same. It's defining a relationship, it's building a system that's says the value we're calling "y", chosen arbitrarily it could be any name, is always twice as big as "x" (also chosen arbitrarily), and then 5 more than that. It's a system we've built, just like the levers or gears, that produces a relationship we want to express for some reason. And you can put them together in any way, and they'll always describe some relationship, even if it's not a useful one.

Now, people have spent hundreds of years, depending on how you want to count, trying to find relationships that also happen to have predictive power. They've built systems where the relationship between "d" and "t" is modeled to be the same as the relationship between "the distance that rock flew from me" and "the time since I threw that rock". And what's nice about finding these relationships is that now that you know what the relationship is, now that you've built the system of levers and pulleys and gears that turn in just the right way, you can start guessing about the rocks before you even throw them, because this relationship you've got on the page is similar to the one you've seen in real life with the rock and the stopwatch.

Once you've got a bunch of these, picking the right one and combining them because more like a puzzle or a maze. I've got these things I know, like the weight of the rock, and the size of the Earth, and how stiff the metal in the spring I'm using to launch this thing is. And I'm trying to figure out its top speed. And I've got a bag of relationships I know are battle-tested. So all I have to do now is start finding relationships that depend on stuff I know to get me stuff I don't know. And if I can link them together like a Rube Goldberg machine, I can figure out something I didn't know using this one relationship, which is handy because this other relationship I'd quite like to use needed that thing I didn't know before but do now.

And so I can work through a chain of relating things to things until I can get to the point where I have enough to use one of the relationships I do know that predicts speed. And once I've got that, I'm done! I trust the relationships I've used, presumably I used them properly and didn't make any dumb mistakes, and so I followed a chain of things I knew, through tools that used those things, to tools that used the things the other tools produced, until I found a path to my goal.

The only thing stopping you from there is the complexity of the relationship, the accuracy of the relationship to the real situation, and how accurately you can measure the things you know.

Math "Infinite and Zero are units like others" Physics "Infinite and Zero are the worst Nightmares"

It's okay not to understand everything about Math. I used to be a big enthusiast, even went to engineering school and loved the Math parts of it. But there are many, many, many topics I don't have the time or energy to grasp them, and I'm okay with that.

But yeah, nothing too magic about it. If you have one apple and you know that someone will give you another apple in 30 minutes, how many apples will you have in 45 minutes? That's right. 2 apples. Of course, predicting orbital trajectories is much more than that. But that's pretty much about it (lol!)

It's not so much math doing that, but physics. Math is just a basic concept of relations. Physics equations are what turns it into a prediction method.

Theoretical Math < Applied Math

• my brain, probably

Same. I was very bad at math in school.

It's not exactly brain surgery, is it?