Gene Roddenberry

Before he imagined a future where humanity reached the stars in peace, Gene Roddenberry flew eighty-nine combat missions over the Pacific, piloted commercial airliners, and walked a beat as a Los Angeles police officer. Only then did he turn to writing for television, penning scripts for Highway Patrol and Have Gun, Will Travel before creating, in 1966, the fictional universe of Star Trek. That is a Leo Sun at the helm: the lion-hearted visionary, generous and dramatic, born to shine at the centre of his own solar system and to build a bright, hopeful world by sheer force of belief. His Sun sits in the third house of communication and self-effort, the anti-lazy craftsman who shone through words, scripts and relentless doing. His Moon in Pisces was the mystic's psyche, the ultimate empath receiving downloads from the universe, divine-level imagination poured into a story about compassion and the human family. That Moon in the ninth house tethered his mind to the biggest questions, philosophy, other cultures, faraway horizons; he made a mythology of the cosmos itself. His Cancer rising was the nurturing mask, the matriarch who wants to mother everyone. He died in 1991, and his ashes were later carried into Earth orbit. He dreamed us upward, and reached the stars in the end.