Check an object's angle

I'm trying to make a lunar lander game for an open ended project. This program will only utilize two of Alice's three dimensions. In this program I want to have the lunar lander object fall to the ground with a set acceleration. My plan for accomplishing this is to create a method which makes the lunar lander move down. The distance it moves down is calculated every tenth of a second and is determined by the function D= ut + .5at where D is distance and u is initial acceleration.

This should solve the problem of making the lander fall down, but what I'd next like to do is create a method, activated by the user pressing up, which accelerates the lander forward. This would check the veolocity with which the lander is falling and the thrust added by the acceleration and make a determination about how much to move it up. This would move the lander right and up (possibly at negative amounts depending on the orientation) but would require knowledge of the orientation in order to be able to establish vectors. What I'd really like to do is get the object's angular orientation in degrees but I've got no idea how to do this or if it's possible. Any help is much appreciated!