Orbital Astrology by Luciano Drusetta

Article by Luciano Drusetta, Italy

Some of the readers may know my dissertation on the Extraterrestrial Astrology, originally published on the Italian magazine Ricerca ‘90, issues 44 to 47, and also available on Saptarishis Astrology Website. In brief, the Extraterrestrial Astrology is an attempt of ‘exporting’ our daily astrology activity into outer space in order to be able to assess, at an astrological level, all the events that may happen anywhere other than on our planet Earth: such as births (natal charts), birthdays (Solar Returns) but also Lunar Returns, transits and any other astrologically detectable event that astrologers may deal with. This means literally anywhere: in orbit around the Earth, on the Moon, on Mars, or even any other place in the Universe.

One of the most frequent criticisms to my Extraterrestrial Astrology is that it may represent a nice intellectual exercise of theoretical astrology, while is of virtually no practical use. Indeed, thinking of a human birth in space does not appear realistic. But if such event – I have to admit it – is not just around the corner, several people have already spent a birthday in the space. Hence my Extraterrestrial Astrology may have already found its practical application in the study of Solar Returns. Don’t you

believe me? Let us consider a few facts taken from the German website www.spacefacts.de.

This site, also available in English, gives you the full list of the astronauts, cosmonauts, trikonauts and space tourists from the very beginning of the space adventure until our days. Strictly speaking, with the word astronauts we usually refer to the U.S. astronauts, or to those people of other nationalities who have flown with US space agency NASA. The word cosmonauts refers to Soviet or Russian astronauts or to astronauts of any other nationality who have flown with the Soviet space agency – I mean, the agency of formerly Soviet Union, presently Russian space agency. Trikonauts are the Chinese astronauts, while all the others are usually referred to as space travellers or space tourists. Here I will use the term astronaut in the broadest sense of the term, referring to all the people who have ever flown in the space.

In early 2003, shortly before the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia, destroyed over Texas during re-entry, the site Spacefacts listed more than 400 people who had flown in space until then. The number of effective astronauts is actually much higher, but most of them are still in waiting list for the first flight, while others used to work as an astronaut but have never gone to space. To make a long story short, since Yuri Gagarin more than 400 people have gone to the space as an astronaut or as a tourist. Of each of them, the website Spacefacts gives: the place and date of their birth (alas, without the time!), the dates of their missions in space, and some biographical notes. Based on this information, we can get to know how many of them, and which ones, have ever celebrated a birthday in space.

Some of you may argue that without the time of birth it is impossible to determine the exact time of a Solar Return. This is true, but it is also true that the SR always takes place within the three days around the civil birthday: it can only be on the very day of the birthday, or the day before, or the day after. Following this simple rule, and based on the information given by the website Spacefacts, anyone can find out how many people have actually had a SR in space.

The result surprised even me: as for early 2003 44 people had certainly had a Solar Return in space. It is not a negligible number: it is more than 10% of the total number of astronauts. A further 11 astronauts may have had,  but not certainly had a SR in space. This obviously depends on their time of birth and on the detailed schedule of their space missions. I mean that some of those eleven astronauts were just taking off or they were just re-entering from orbit on the very day of their civil birthday. Therefore these 11 cases require further investigation.

In any case, this is 44 + 11 = 55 interesting astrological cases; some of them were dramatic, and

I think that it would be worth to study them in depth. Among these 11 cases perhaps the most outstanding and sad story is that of Viktor Ivanovich Patsayev [Fig. 1, left], who died in 1971 during the re-entry of the Soyuz 11 – immediately after his SR in space. Patsayev and two fellow cosmonauts had been sent to spend some time in the orbiting station Salyut, which would become part of the famous orbiting station MIR. Probably due to a loss of pressurization in the re-entry module, the three cosmonauts perished – a dramatic event, although not so striking as the accidents to the two ill-fated shuttles Challenger and Columbia. Incidentally, none of the members of the crew of the two tragic missions Challenger and Columbia had spent their SR in space.

A birthday in orbit is not necessarily a fatal experience: this is confirmed by the less dramatic, yet still significant case of Charles “Pete” Conrad [Fig. 2, lower right on the previous page], a veteran of space flights since the days of the first Gemini missions. Together with two fellow astronauts, Conrad formed the first crew of Skylab which had been orbiting for a time, empty, waiting for the first men to arrive and occupy it. There were no technical problems whatsoever, either during the mission or during the re-entry, but the astrologically interesting fact was that Pete Conrad, after spending his SR in space, left NASA at the height of his career and moved to Colorado to take over a prestigious government charge.

The study of these and other specific cases of Orbital Astrology involves certain verifications that are quite difficult to solve. So for the time being what I can do is simply introducing to you some technical issues related to the calculation of a SR in space and proposing you one example to study, even though – unluckily – it can only be a hypothetical case.

THE QUESTION OF THE HORIZON

As you may recall, one of the basic principles of the Extraterrestrial – and not only the Extraterrestrial – Astrology is that the House system of our charts must be cast considering the place where the subject stands in that moment. This is an obvious concept, but it must be repeated because it is taken for granted in the case of a natal chart, while not all the astrologers accept that the chart of a SR be cast considering the place where the subject is in that moment. In the context we are dealing with now this is a fundamental concept, so that if one does not stick to this rule, all the reasoning that follows becomes nonsense.

Now, following the afore mentioned principle some people suggested that when the subject is in orbit around the Earth, the centre of the astrological chart (normally occupied by our planet Earth) should be occupied by the spacecraft or by the orbiting base, and that the House system should be calculated based on a horizon that runs through the orbiting vehicle. I would immediately discharge this hypothesis, because it would involve a task very difficult to solve: we should build up and point out, on such a small and manoeuvrable heavenly body as the space shuttle or the orbiting base, a logical system of actual geographical coordinates in miniature. We should establish an axis of rotation of the vehicle, two poles, a horizon, and to make a long story short, if you wish you can try it – but I prefer to deal with other possibilities.

In fact, when drawing the Houses in our charts, we do not take in consideration the subjective horizon. When you were born and we cast your natal chart, we do not care whether you were delivered upside down with your head down and your belly in the air; and when you have your Solar Return, we do not care if at that time you are doing yoga or if you are scuba-diving or somersaulting under water: in any case we draw the line ASC-DSC horizontally with the MC up and the IC down. For what we consider to be “above”, i.e. the daytime hemisphere, the top of the chart, is not what is physically above the subject’s head. The top of an astrological chart is that portion of the sky that is above the horizon line: namely, the line that in our charts goes from the Ascendant to the Descendant. If the subject lies upside down the parameters of the question do not change. If you have Mars at the MC, you keep having Mars there even if you bury your head in the sand like an ostrich. By doing so, your Mars does not end up in the Imum Coeli! Similarly, no matter if the space shuttle actually flies in orbit upside down and its crew has the Earth above their heads. And it does not matter if a future orbiting base would be rotating regularly around its axis to create artificial gravity: from the astrological and astronomical point of view, the horizon that we use for the House system will be the same – we are going to define it in the following sections.

I am assuming that in the case of people or objects in orbit around the Earth, the House system always refers to the geographical coordinates of the place over flown at that time. Starting from that place you will have to calculate the horizon which is the base to all the House systems. I will consider two possibilities now: the first is that we take in consideration the height factor; the second is that the height or altitude can be safely ignored.

HOW HORIZON CHANGES WITH THE ELEVATION

The most common definition of Ascendant is: the sign that we can see rising at the Eastern horizon at a given time. Do you all agree? If you agree with this definition, you implicitly understand that the calculations of the Houses use the visible horizon or the geometric horizon. There is a slight difference between the two. The visible horizon is a little bit wider than the geometrical one: due to atmospheric refraction phenomena we can actually see up to a little farther distance than what the simple geometric calculations would allow us to see. However in this article I’ll consider these two types of horizon as perfectly identical.

So let us define the visible horizon [Fig. 3, below] as the circle that serves as the basis of a cone whose apex is the observer. The radius R of this circle indicates the maximum distance that we can actually see (not considering the already mentioned refractive phenomena) and it grows with the height at which the observer stands, according to the following formula (an approximate but effective one):

R = 3,570 multiplied for the square root of H
where H is the height in meters.

According to this formula, an average man (say, six feet tall) under normal conditions, at sea level can see at a distance of 3,570 meters multiplied by the square root of 180 cm, which is equal to 1.34 cm. So he sees up to a distance of 3,570 x 1.34 = 4,783.80 m. At a height of 4 meters we can see little more than 7 km. At a height of 100 meters [Fig. 4, previous page, right] we can see within a radius of 35.5 km. In the mountains, at an altitude of a thousand meters, we can see until a distance of about 113 km. From a plane flying at a cruise altitude of 10,000 feet we can see things in a radius of about 357 km. Manned orbital vehicles are positioned normally on low orbits at a distance varying from 100 to 400 km from the surface. At a distance of 200 km from the surface, the visible horizon covers up to 1,600 km.

But as you know, the matter is complicated by the fact that the Earth is not flat. As we move away from its surface, we realize that we are on a sphere, and as we fly farther off in to the outer space we can see it become smaller and smaller. On the ground we have the impression that we are on a plate that covers exactly half of the sky: 180° of 360 of the celestial vault. Starting from a certain height, we realize that we are actually over a convex plane covering less than 180°. The following formula helps us quantify this progressive deformation of the visible horizon: [Fig. 5, left]

D = R / sin x

where D is the distance of the watcher from the centre of the Earth; R is the average radius of the Earth (let us assume that it is equal to 6,400 km); and x is half the visual angle, also equal to half the apparent size of the Earth as seen from a given distance. Now, this formula takes the distances from the surface of the Earth, not from its centre. But this is not a problem, because we can simply subtract R from D and we get the data we are seeking for.

Now let us consider some practical examples of how a horoscopic chart could get deformed if the Ascendant-Descendant line were to follow the deformation of the visual horizon at various heights. Let us begin from a chart normally subdivided in Houses at any location at ground [Fig. 6, right]: in this situation the horizon covers exactly half of the sky = 180° of the chart.

At a height of 500 km the horizon appears to be strongly curved, as to cover only 150°. So in our hypothetical natal chart subdivided in Houses at such elevation [Fig. 7, left] the line ASC-DSC will also be curved and it would split the chart into unequal halves: the lower one (night) of 150° and the higher one (daytime) of 210°. As the logical consequence of the curvature of the line Ascendant-Descendant, the Descendant point (i.e. the cusp of the Seventh House) is no longer diametrically opposite the Ascendant point (i.e. the cusp of the First House). In the specific case of the chart drawn in Fig. 7, the Ascendant at approximately 20° Aries corresponds to the Descendant at approximately 20° Virgo.

Please note that the deformation does not affect the line MC-IC, which I neglected to draw in these charts. I did so for the sake of clarity, but also to draw the reader’s attention on the line ASC-DSC.

From a distance of 1,000 kilometres from its surface, the Earth appears as a sphere of 120° in diameter, and it would cover only four signs of the Zodiac, while the upper half of our chart would extend of 240 long degrees [Fig. 8, right]. The example proposed here shows an Ascendant falling somewhere in between Aries and Taurus, while the Descendant falls somewhere in between Virgo and Leo.

This is a critical distance, because beyond the distance of 1,000 km the line ASC-DSC, which in effect represents our planet Earth in our astrological charts, no longer touches the centre of the chart. In other words, it is beginning from this distance that we can start talking about real, effective Extraterrestrial Astrology. Unless you represent our bent horizon by drawing a parabola instead of a circular arc: only in this way the ASC-DSC line, despite being strongly deformed, could continue to tap the centre of the chart.

Let us boldly go further – and farther. From a distance of 2,600 km [Fig. 9, upper left], the Earth occupies 90 degrees of the sky and it covers only three zodiacal signs. At a distance equal to the mean radius of Earth (6,400 km) the Earth covers 60° [Fig. 10, below], while at a distance of 18,300 kilometres [Fig. 11, lower left] it appears as a sphere of 30°. Also the distance of 18,300 kilometres from Earth’s surface is a critical distance, because only starting from this distance we can see the Earth (although for very short periods) somehow “included” in one zodiac sign, thus becoming (at least in my opinion) a celestial body just like any other in the sky – i.e. yet another element of our charts, an element which can be read just like any other, a planet to which the future astrological tradition would assign an interpretation of its own.

As seen from the Moon, at about 384,000 kilometres from here, the Earth is reduced to an apparent magnitude of only 2 degrees [Fig. 12, below]. Let me stress that, as seen from the Earth, the Moon and the Sun both have an apparent size of half a degree. This would offer the opportunity to argue about the real accuracy and reliability of the ephemerides telling us the position of the Luminaries with a precision reaching the minutes or the seconds of arc – but this would lead us far from the scope of this research of Orbital Astrology. I’ll come back to this subject another day instead.

The linear length of the Earth as seen from the Moon is “only” four times greater than the linear length of the Moon as seen from the Earth. Do not let this mislead you. Remember that we are talking of a circle in the celestial vault, so the Earth is actually much greater, seen from the lunar surface: a quick mental calculation led me to reckon that it should appear at least 12 to 16 times larger than the Moon as we can see it from the Earth! In other words, if we were on the Moon we would probably see a huge Earth actually. At least it would be enormous for us earthlings, accustomed as we are at our Moon measuring half a degree – and even so, sometimes, our Moon does appear very big indeed, especially if it’s close to the horizon or if it appears to us against a reference point such as a building, a tower, or a tree.

IGNORING THE HEIGHT FACTOR

After having wowed you by the special effects of science fiction, I invite you to reflect: are you really sure that the line ASC-DSC becomes deformed with the height? To answer this question we must first revise the definition that we had given of the Ascendant as the sign that we actually can “see” rising on the Eastern horizon at a given moment. Is it really so? Do we astrologers, in our House system, really consider the visible horizon? Here is the answer…

At the height at which manned space missions usually orbit (as we said, it is usually between 100 and 400 km from Earth surface), the deformation of the visible horizon – therefore the possible deformation of the 12 Houses – is reduced to a bare minimum, at least if compared to the striking examples that I have showed you so far, relevant to much farther distances. Since all the work of the astrologer is balanced between accuracy and precision (another intriguing topic that someday I would like to… boldly elaborate in my articles), it is my opinion that in this case we are allowed to approximate, thus ignoring any possible deformation of the Houses.

There is another reason that makes me lean towards the total irrelevancy of the height factor while drawing the Houses for a chart in orbit. I’ll tell you right now. First let me remind you that besides the visible horizon and the geometric horizon (that so far I’ve considered to be perfectly overlapping here just for convenience), there are two other types of horizon. The first one is the astronomical horizon, defined as the plane parallel to the geometrical horizon and tangent to the watcher’s place of station.

It is my belief that when we astrologers cast and draw our Houses in the chart, we actually consider yet another kind of horizon: the rational one, defined as the plane parallel to both the geometric and the astronomical horizon, and passing through the Earth’s centre [Fig. 13, left shows these three horizons in two dimensions, while Fig. 14 below tries to represent them in 3D]. It is also my opinion that luckily for us, the rational horizon – which is the fundamental building block for the construction of our line ASC-DSC – does not deform with the height. On the other hand, given the huge distances that we face when we relate our Earth to the celestial vault, we can safely consider that our planet Earth is a simple non-dimensional point in the very centre of the vault. As a consequence, the rational horizon can be safely considered as perfectly coincident with the astronomical horizon.

This is why I believe that a SR in orbit should be subdivided into the 12 Houses based on the coordinates of the place over-flown by the spacecraft at that time, leaving out the factor altitude. This place is called sub satellite point. For in space, when everything is related to the celestial vault and to the Zodiac, the distances vanish and I am sure that 100 km more or less do not make any difference between an object lying on the ground and an object flying on the vertical of the same place. This is my humble, personal opinion. Obviously the last word will be the word of the first astrologers who are able to study a real case of SR in orbit, and to compare two charts drawn according to the two different criteria: one considering, and the other one ignoring the height factor.

SATELLITE BUSTING

Let us try and calculate, as a mere didactical exercise, the SR of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, fancying that in a fit of megalomania he decided to visit the International Space Station just before his birthday of 2003. Are you wondering why bother to fantasize about Mr. Berlusconi in orbit when we have at least 44 real cases of Solar Returns in space to study? I’ll tell you right now, in connection with the two most striking cases of SR in space. While in Patsayev’s case we do not know his time of birth, the time of birth of Pete Conrad is known but this is no good – because we are not able to determine exactly the Skylab position at the time of Conrad’s Solar Return. With Silvio Berlusconi, the task is much easier to solve. First, we do know his time of birth and therefore we can safely say that his SR of 2003 occurred at 10:21 GMT of the 29^th of September. What is left is to get to know where the space base was flying in that exact moment and at what altitude (if we also want to consider the possible deformation of the line ASC-DSC).

No problem – these and other pieces of information are provided by excellent software packages, called satellite busters, especially developed for those amateurs who love to go “hunting” artificial satellites to watch them with a telescope or binoculars. Most of this software can be downloaded free from the Internet in a demo or shareware version. They are light executables that can be installed in any computer. They read the orbital data from text files with .TLE extension and return on your computer screen the exact location of the satellite you are looking for at the time that you want. They also provide a number of interesting data, including the sub satellite point, which is precisely the element that we need to cast our charts, explicitly the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the place over which the satellite flies at that time. They also give the height of the object from the ground, for those who want to play with the deformation of the Houses.

However, the “satellite buster” software programs have significant limitations. The files containing the orbital data must be updated constantly; if we use non-recent data we may get some nice surprises. For example, in early 2003 I installed one of these software programs to know where the International Space Station (ISS) would be in September, during Mr. Berlusconi’s birthday and the answer was… that it would have already fallen on Earth! This is because, obviously, the artificial satellites do not stay in orbit forever. In order to keep them in space without letting them fall down on to our heads, their pilots or controllers give them a helping hand from time to time. Later on that year, fed with more recent data, the same software told me that if Mr. Berlusconi had been on board the ISS, he would have spent his Solar Return at approximately 360 km above the point of longitude 134° E and latitude 52° N. This would have been his SR then. I leave the analysis of its reading to you [Fig. 15 upper left on the previous page shows his natal chart, Fig. 16 lower right on the previous page is his chart of SR at ground, Fig. 17 below left shows the same chart at the height of 360 km].

CONCLUSIONS

Now back to reality, namely to those 44 sure cases plus those 11 probable cases of SR in space, which I have mentioned at the beginning of this article. As I told you, we do know the time of birth of Pete Conrad – therefore we could calculate the exact time of his SR in orbit. Unluckily there is another hindrance yet. It is not possible to trace the exact position of the Skylab at that time, because the data files containing the orbital positions for those “satellite buster” pieces of software only refer to objects launched after 1980 and still currently in orbit. No data available for the space shuttles, Skylab, Soyuz, Gemini, Apollo missions…

Even the available data should be taken with care. First of all, TLE files usually contain official data which does not mean real data. Often the data contained in the available files refer to the schedules of the intended flight path at the time of take-off. There is no guarantee that in the end a space shuttle or the space station really sticks to the planned routes. As for the Solar Returns on Earth some approximation is a must; especially if you wish to relocate a SR, you can always spend a few hours in the selected place for the relocation, thus counterbalancing possible uncertainty about the time of birth and the exact time of the Solar Return itself. But the objects in orbit are constantly moving, quickly flying always from West to East.

Let us open a small parenthesis of general orbital culture. Why do the satellites orbit always eastwards? Because at the moment of take-off, in order to achieve the required escape velocity, the rockets take advantage of the centrifugal force produced by the natural movement of rotation of the Earth. In my naiveté, I imagined that when a rocket rises it goes up in a straight line, while the Earth rotates beneath. If it were so, it would move from East to West. Things do not really go like this: Earth works as a “slingshot” and when the rocket lifts from the ramp and liberates from the gravitational pull, it is a bit like a stone when it is detached from the sling, i.e. throwing itself in the same direction that the sling gave to it initially.

For this reason there is also a precise relationship between the latitude of the launching site and the orbital tilt, which is also influenced by unavoidable political variables to be taken into account. First, we define an equatorial orbit having a tilt or inclination or 0° (the satellite constantly flies over the equator) and a polar orbit having a tilt or inclination of 90° (it flies over both poles, crossing the equator at a right angle). The Russian missions that depart from Baikonur at just over 45° N, they should follow an orbit with a tilt of 45 degrees, but it is not so, because shortly after take-off they must consume a great deal of fuel to reach the latitude of 51° N because they are not allowed to fly over China. Similarly, the space shuttles departing from Cape Canaveral at 28°30’ N had to consume a lot of fuel to reach the orbit of 51° and engage the MIR.

Back to the example of Silvio Berlusconi’s hypothetical SR in space, we can cast his SR in space only if we do not have any doubt about his time of birth, therefore about the exact time of his SR, because only one minute later than 10:22 GMT the space station would have been quite far away from the reckoned point. It would have been in fact over the point of latitude 51° N and longitude 140° E. This would have led to significant differences in the chart of the SR [Fig. 18 left: chart at ground level, Fig. 19 below right: same chart at height]. Not to mention that also the altitude of the space missions changes constantly. As a consequence, dealing with Orbital Astrology requires much greater precision (or said in other words, it allows a much smaller tolerance) than the earthly Astrology of everyday life – earthly not only because it is a geocentric astrology, but also because it is cast, reckoned, drawn and read at ground level.

* * *

In this article I presented some of the issues related to the study of Solar Returns in space. There is a relative abundance of specific cases that may already be studied, but it is counterbalanced by a chronic lack of data for the historic mission and the insufficient reliability of the official orbital data. With this new chapter of my Extraterrestrial Astrology I hope I have shown that not only the calculation of a SR in space is possible, but it is also necessary to address these issues. In fact a good fifty people have already had a SR in orbit and we can not ignore this fact any longer. The number of people who will spend their birthday in space is doomed to increase rapidly in the close future. Perhaps even the birth of the first human being in space is not as distant as we may believe.

Two short technical notes:

1) The natal charts and the charts of SR are produced by Ciro Discepolo’s software package of professional astrology, Astral. I slightly modified them with MS Paint to re-draw the cusps of the Houses and to show how they shift if we consider the deformation of the horizon in height.

2) When drawing the “deformed” charts I applied a rigorous calculation only to the line ASC-DSC. The line MC-IC, in fact, refers to the meridian and does not change with height. The other cusps of the charts in altitude have been reckoned in an approximate way, still trying to reflect the criteria of subdivision of the quadrants of the trigonometric House system of Placidus.

About Author: Born in 1962 and I have been an astrological counsellor to individuals, couples and businesses for almost thirty years. After experimenting different schools of Astrology, ten years ago I resolved to join Ciro Discepolo’s astrological method and school, named Active Astrology — based on the active relocation of the Solar Returns (Mr. Discepolo calls them: Aimed Solar Returns or Aimed Birthdays) and the exorcism of the symbols, as originally conceived by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. I am the founder and current moderator of the newsgroup of astrological discussion and information in Italian language it.