The Complete Spacecraft Tarot

Tippy Ki Yay
15 min readMar 25, 2022

Spacecraft have always fascinated me. We send them out into the universe to be our eyes and our ears across unfathomable distances, and in the process, they take on personalities of their own. They are like little curious adventurers, exploring their surroundings and collecting stimuli. Like us, they experience hardships, suffer defeat, and celebrate victories.

To overcome my own obstacles in life, I frequently use tarot as a tool for self-reflection. I believe that universally-known symbols — such as the fool, the lovers, the star — help us frame our situations and connect more closely with each other.

My interests in spacecraft and tarot have always run parallel — until eventually, they collided!

For the past couple of years, I have been devoting all of my spare time to creating the Spacecraft Tarot. The Spacecraft Tarot includes 22 cards based on the Major Arcana of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

I performed A TON of research to put this deck together. For each and every single card, I published an essay on my Medium page about the history of the spacecraft, its importance to scientific discovery, and why I felt that spacecraft was the perfect fit for that specific card.

For those interested in purchasing a deck, please stay tuned for a Kickstarter that will launch within the next couple of weeks. If you would like to be alerted when that happens, consider signing up for my email list. (I promise not to spam you. I am not organized enough to do that.)

Without further adieu, here is the complete deck:

The Fool: Sputnik

The original watercolor illustration is by me, Tippy Ki Yay. The background image is Hubble imagery and the credit belongs to NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI).

The Fool represents a new beginning.

The Fool is naïve and open to new experiences, without any skepticism or weariness to deter him. Even if the future is unclear or uncertain, he boldly takes steps into the unknown without fear or reservation. The Fool serves as a reminder to bring a fresh perspective to every…