How much does this matter?

The rising sign changes signs every TWO HOURS because there are 12 signs and 24 hours in the day. Being off by an hour means half the people will be told the wrong rising sign. And ALL people will be told the wrong degree which impacts aspects and transits.

How much does it matter that we have a dozen house systems and fundamentally don't agree on house details if you are an engineer at NASA?

I have absolutely no idea. I'm guessing the big information is stuff like "Planets that form a 90 degree angle to Earth at launch time or to the current path of travel of some space vehicle will create a high energy gulf stream, so to speak, which can potentially cause problems OR get used  to rapidly ride that wave to where you are going."

Will NASA need to "correct" existing astrological lore about house systems to use this information? My two answers are No and Not Necessarily. 

So I once had this get rich quick scheme where I was going to offer to do a quick and dirty romance compatibility astrological thing and market it to heterosexual women, in part because it's usually women who are into astrology and in part because this logistically works better for a potential hetero relationship if the person snooping is the woman rather than the man.

Generally speaking, when looking at a heterosexual relationship, you look at HIS Sun and Mars and HER Moon and Venus to get a quick and dirty idea of romantic or sexual compatibility. Since you need more than just a birthday to find the Moon position, this doesn't work if a heterosexual man is trying to figure out quick and dirty compatibility with a woman he knows where he only knows her birthday.

So a woman who knows her OWN astrological chart can look up his Sun position which you only need a DATE of birth -- aka birthday -- to know within one degree of accurate because there's 365 days in an Earth year and 360 degrees in a circle and then compare that information to your own Moon and Venus to get quick and dirty compatibility. 

You don't even necessarily need his year of birth. If you know his birthday, you can find a good enough answer.

Not true for any other heavenly body.

If you are a man, her birthday isn't enough information because the Moon changes signs every 2.5 days so you frequently can't be certain what her Moon SIGN is, much less its degree within that sign, without an accurate place and time of birth (in addition to birth date, including year).

Can space agencies develop their own theory of a house system to check subtle influences? Probably. But even without that, having broad strokes of gravitational weather will be enormously helpful in improving travel times and reducing wrecks.

Please make sure your astrologer has a sophisticated and accurate understanding because astrology is inferred information about how gravity wakes impact people in observable ways.

NASA can check the hypothesis by adjusting course and seeing if the durn thing travels faster on less fuel consumption. 

Astrologers getting paid to cast charts may not really want to be too picky about checking their astrological mental models because it's paying their bills. 

I did it as a hobby to help me sort my baggage and figure myself out. My metric was "Is this useful for me to improve my life?" Anyone making a living at it, their most important metric is how much money they make.

But the stuff you see all over the place about "If you are X sun sign, you will come into money on X day!" is more or less baloney. The practices for writing such predictions are rooted in carney acts: You hedge your bets and hem and haw and give orbs of influence and say "It could be THIS day OR a month earlier OR a month later...."

It's a snow job and at best ENTERTAINMENT. It's NOT a good use of astrology and helps give it a very bad reputation and that bad reputation is very much deserved at the moment.

That's from a piece called Limits and Reasonable Uses. 

Like doctors, astrologers probably developed a highly respected reputation at one time because both of them were learned men and because they were learned men, they consistently gave good advice. 

Doctors gave good health advice when most people lived in small towns and everyone knew each other and it was common for them to visit you at home with their little black bag. This meant one of the best educated people in town knew a lot of context about your life without asking or even if you were lying. 

His goal was to get you healthy, not play morality police, so he gave advice based on what he knew was true even if you weren't admitting you drank heavy or you were a philanderer and called it "medicine" not "I'm such a wise individual."

Medicine has kind of gone to hell with the way it gets practiced changing. Ditto for astrology. 

I was casting charts for people I knew personally or socially and clothing my advice in astrological language. Reality: I knew these people and had done therapy myself. 

Astrologers are in the business of giving people good life advice and that mostly is about having common sense. Astrology is a means to an end for them. Many could be therapists or couples counselors BUT they want to charge for advice TODAY and don't have the credentials required to charge money under those titles. 

So you call yourself an astrologer, give out useful advice because you have common sense others lack and there's no Board of Astrology gatekeeping you out of the astrology business. 

Historically, good astrologers typically worked for kings because they were the only people who had the money that you need to have to compensate someone for the time and expertise involved in casting a chart by hand and giving good advice for situations that had significant enough impact to merit paying a well paid advisor.

They did so when the world was smaller and a learned man could know enough about all immediate neighboring countries and the political landscape to reliably give helpful information to the king.

This mostly was not about the astrology. 

Nostrodamus is best remembered as being a psychic. Even if he hadn't written his predictions about the future, he would likely still be in the history books because he was a talented physician whose patients during the Black Plague did unusually well.

So "psychics" and "astrologers" are frequently smart people giving good advice because they are smart and they need some means to explain it or justify it or whatever. 

That's not sufficient for translating astrological tradition to the basis of using astrological charts as effective space navigation. 

I think it's doable, but not all astrologers are equally qualified to help you figure that out.

Astrology has gone to hell because modern astrologers mostly can't get kings and billionaires to pay their bills and are looking for ways to sell information to the masses and make enough money at it for that to make sense as a career.

This actively promotes carney-act practices because you buy a program and mass produce garbage for a few bucks apiece. It doesn't make sense as a career to hand-cast individual charts for a paltry sum, so the quality of advice has declined -- in part because mathematical accuracy of most paid charts has declined -- and with it the general reputation of the field of astrology. 

None of which has any significant impact on calculating a geocentric map and checking the aspects or mathematical angles between heavenly bodies as a potential space navigation tool.