There’s no north or anything, are there coordinates or you just point at a planet and go for it?
In: Physics
It’s highly dependent upon where you’re going! Aerospace engineering student here, and essentially you base your location entirely off of other celestial objects but there are hugely different “frames of reference” to choose from. For example, if you’re just trying to go from the earth to the moon, you consider the three-dimensional origin to be the center of the Earth and then the moon is in orbit around the Earth and you can track your location relative to the Earth. You still have to account for atmospheric drag, solar radiation pressure, and gravities of the moon and sun but that’s the gist.
However, if you are trying to move from the Earth to Mars, then you want your three-dimensional origin to be centered on the sun and then you launch from the Earth aiming at a currently empty point in space where the math tells you Mars is going to be in the ~6 months that it takes to get there. This way, your location, the Earth’s location, and Mars’ location are all defined in relation to the position of the Sun so you can determine where all three objects are currently and where they will all be in 6 months or whatever it may be.
An interesting point here is that contrary to TV you don’t just fly straight towards another planet in a rocket. Increasing your speed in an orbit also increases the distance of the orbit trajectory from the object you are orbiting around. Thus, you can increase your speed so high that you exit the orbit but you’re still moving in an elliptical trajectory (oval-shape) so you basically slingshot out of Earth’s orbit towards the point in space where you need Mars to be, which means there are certain windows of time where it’s not actually possible to make the journey because Mars simply wouldn’t be where you want to end up and there’s no possible way to reach it at that time. This is due to the difference in distance from the Sun of the planets and also how fast those planets are moving around the Sun, but you can actually pretty precisely calculate the window of possibility for when you can make a journey and space missions are generally designed to be well well WELL within the window as absolutely every possible safety precaution is taken.
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