north-south make sense to expand to space. east-west generally don't. but what do make a more general sense are the lines connecting the equinoxes and the solstices. so when talking about position in space, maybe this is the way we should be doing it?
we could also talk about the major and minor axes of the Earth's orbit— this is a bit less intuitive, but could be tracked on the ground if someone was good at measuring the apparent radius of the moon.