Matt Gialich

Yeah, sorry.

So, well, we did send one satellite, but also one dish on the ground, right?

And we use two different techniques.

We use what's essentially called range and range rate, very similar to GPS, very similar in the same way, except we don't have, you know, GPS requires four satellites to get a complete signal with time.

We use one, and so we determine how far away we are and what velocity we're going.

And then we have to propagate that through our filters to say where we should be, where we are, use it as an update.

We know we're on a trajectory.

Keep in mind,

The spacecraft and Earth are moving in different relativistic trajectories from each other, right, at the time.

So while we're not triangulating with multiple dishes, what we are doing instead is waiting for Earth to move and then getting an update, just like you would in a synthetic aperture radar.

It's the same idea for how we do spacecraft communication, right?

The Earth is moving away from the vehicle, so we get multiple data points of where it is, and we can correlate its trajectory out into space.

So...

So the Earth does get in our way.

That's why we use multiple dishes, which, oh, my God, for our last mission, we had, like, disaster central with multiple dishes.

It was a fun exercise in learning this.

One thing that's a little bit different than us, Sean, than a lot of space companies right now, well, than all of them, is we're going to deep space.

And so...

What this is is I'm assuming the same shit Elon went through with Falcon 1.

You're dealing with antiquated infrastructure.