Not only for course changes.
Basicly, Aurora moves fleets in a "I go - you go" manner.
Lets assume you have a beam fleet, that you set to keep a distance of, say 100,000 km, so your ships are in range of the enemy, while the enemies ships, which have a shorter range, will stay out of range and the enemy fleet is set to move to a range of 50,000km, so it can bring _its_ weapons to bear.
If your TG senior officer has a lower Fleet Operation skill than the enemy, then your fleet will move first (in this case, to a distance of 100,000km) and then the enemy fleet will move to 50,000km.
If, on the other hand, your TG senior officer has a higher Fleet Operations skill than the enemie´s, the enemy TG will first close to 50,000km, then your TG will move back to 100,000km again and you can blast the enemy with impunity.