At 08:32:47 Greenwich Mean Time on 11th April 2006 a wardrobe-sized spacecraft did the astronaut’s equivalent of a handbrake turn that slowed it down enough to be trapped in orbit around Venus. Venus Express was launched atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 03:33:34 GMT on 9th November 2005. The £140 million space probe is beginning a 500-day odyssey to map and measure the planet. Small orbit adjustments will be made for the next month to set a path that passes 150 miles above the surface at its nadir and 40 000 miles at its apocentre.

Venus and Earth are roughly the same size and were formed at the same time and from the same materials. But while Earth is a watery paradise in a cold dark universe and a haven for millions of life forms, Venus is the evil twin with temperatures high enough to melt lead and clouds of sulphuric acid blanketing the planet in 12-mile thick layers. Venus has no water and no oxygen. It also lacks the magnetic field which protects Earth from the solar wind…a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. But there are many unanswered questions. The atmosphere of Venus is leaking away at the poles at a hundred tons a day but atmospheric pressure is a hundred times that on Earth.

Meanwhile back on Earth half a million human life forms…men women and children…are killed by armed violence every year. Ten years hence death and injuries from wars and violence will outnumber deaths caused by killer diseases. In one planetary bioregion…home to 456,953,258 human life forms according to the latest count by a peculiar grouping called the European Union…life is controlled by Economic Science.

This Economic Science instructs very large Food Exchange Centres with names like Tesco and Wall-Mart to pay dairy farmers in a province called England seventeen pence for a litre of milk while selling it to customers for fifty pence. They get away with this cold-blooded blackmail by threatening to ship surplus milk by motorised transport across the planetary bioregion at prices kept low by Subsidies and Cheap Production. The result is that English and Welsh Dairy Farmers are going out of business in droves…but very scientifically with the help of a technique of the money system called Bankruptcy. Some of the farmers even kill themselves violently. It is called Suicide.

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It is not often I get a second chance in life. But recently a Solar Eclipse at the pivotal mid-heaven point of my Astral Chart allowed me another shot at a goal that had once meant a lot to me. But I was not alone. Thirty eight million other people in Europe were given the same opportunity. With odds of one in twelve this must be better than playing the European Lottery. But it was important to read the small print. Had I got distracted or made too many concessions I would have failed. That was obviously what the rest of my fellow Cancerians in the European Union did.

The Solar Eclipse on Wednesday 29th March was a marvellous sight…in the Libyan Sahara. Dr John Mason is my stringer. The Sun seemed to be ringed by fire. The rest of the sky was so dark that Venus and Mercury shone bright and the horizon burned pink orange and yellow in twilight. Solar Eclipses are astronomical events but they also produce their own weather phenomena. In the Sahara it had been a gloriously hot day but suddenly cooled off at Totality when the Sun was completely blocked out by the Eclipse. It also grew windy just before and after Totality.

For years scientists dismissed such Eclipse Winds as myth. But measurements made of the Solar Eclipse of 11th August 1999 over Southern England proved it was a real phenomenon. The Moon’s shadow creates a local cooling and as the cold air in the middle of the shadow sinks it hits the ground and pancakes outwards creating a brief and gusty wind. The 1999 measurements also picked up small fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. These carried on for hours after the Eclipse and may have been created in the upper atmosphere as the cold Eclipse Shadow raced across the sky at supersonic speeds. Over the next few hours these disturbances gradually filtered down to the surface.