Imagine tracking and catching something falling from space using only 60s tracking tech. No GPS. Wow.
I was reading a scientific magazine article about the planed return of the Genesis spacecraft’s samples. They were writing about how the probe will float back to Earth under a parachute and a helicopter will catch it mid—air. That plan sounded absolutely bonkers crazy to me and I would have assumed they needed a long process of trial drops to practice this stunt, but the documented evidence shown that they were quite non-chalant about it. Almost as if they have done such things previously. But since there were no public evidence of prior art I assumed some classified spy stuff was what gave them the experience needed to be confident about the skill. (This was 7 years before the declassification of the existence of the KH-9 program)
(yes, I know it's not a real quote)
I only wrote about this because later it become clear that I was right.
I would never tell you about how much time I spent thinking about how a submarine could use laser back-scatter to track the slightly warmer wake of an enemy submarine. :P Not until they declassify that too.
This is where GPS+track prediction could help a lot. And why I think it's so impressive.