Using Chaos to Guide a Spacecraft to the moon

Typically, chaotic dynamics exhibit highly irregular behavior and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions prevents long-term prediction of the state of the system. However, the inherent exponential sensitivity of chaotic time evolutions to perturbations can be exploited to direct trajectories to some desired final state by the use of a carefully chosen sequence of small perturbations to some control parameters. These perturbations can be so small that they do not significantly change the system dynamics, but enable the intrinsic system dynamics to drive the trajectory to the desired final state. This process has been called targeting.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576500001259

In his book, Belbruno tells the story of how he used chaos theory to get the world’s first spaceship (a Japanese spaceship named Hiten, which means “A Buddhist Angel that Dances in Heaven”) to the moon without using fuel.

http://treeoflifereview.com/spotlight_belbruno.php

https://www.edbelbruno.com/