During the last stream they asked if it was hard to not get lost while flying a rocket. I thought I would try to give them an answer:
It's pretty much impossible to get lost between planets because the ship is stays on a set course as long as the rocket engines aren't firing. You only fire the rocket when you are near planets because that's the most efficient time to use them. Firing the rocket requires very carefully calculating the exact time and direction to get where you want so you need to calculate this ahead of time. The window of time when you can fire the rocket in order to reach your destination is what they mean when they talk about "launch windows". If you launch incorrectly you will go off target and you might be lost in the sense that you aren't coming back (unless you have enough extra fuel to do a corrective burn) but the ground crew tracking you will still know exactly where you are and where you are going. The flight of spacecraft is so closely tracked that they noticed when the spacecraft Pioneer slowed down by 1 km/hr over the course of a decade..
So, it's pretty much impossible to get lost in space, but you need to be very careful when you start your flight.
It's pretty much impossible to get lost between planets because the ship is stays on a set course as long as the rocket engines aren't firing. You only fire the rocket when you are near planets because that's the most efficient time to use them. Firing the rocket requires very carefully calculating the exact time and direction to get where you want so you need to calculate this ahead of time. The window of time when you can fire the rocket in order to reach your destination is what they mean when they talk about "launch windows". If you launch incorrectly you will go off target and you might be lost in the sense that you aren't coming back (unless you have enough extra fuel to do a corrective burn) but the ground crew tracking you will still know exactly where you are and where you are going. The flight of spacecraft is so closely tracked that they noticed when the spacecraft Pioneer slowed down by 1 km/hr over the course of a decade..
So, it's pretty much impossible to get lost in space, but you need to be very careful when you start your flight.