The highly praised ESA Gaia satellite mission has already provided the astronomic communitywith high quality astrometric, photometric and other data for almost 2 billion stars, and will continue to do sofor the next years. As time goes by, the precision of the astrometry increases with the number of measurementsand the time-span during which these are obtained, growing. Thus the correction of systematic effects in thedata, such as aberration need to be corrected to a point, where the conventional means do not suffice anymore.To accomplish this, a programme was conceived, to track the satellite with highly precise (20 mas) groundbased astrometry to deliver the required data for the optimisation of Gaia’s accuracy, called Ground BasedOptical Tracking (GBOT). This programme has faced many challenges and uncertainties, as well as set backs,but finally GBOT has come to the point, where its data are being included in the processing of the Gaiaastrometry, since 2020.This presentation will give an overview of the history of GBOT, and the steps taken to ensure final success,after many years of challenges. I will also report on a project searching for asteroids on the existing GBOTdata, which has lead to observations of about 42,000 objects, of which about 18,000 were previously unknown.