Vela is six years old and the youngest person in the album. She is named, like Nova and Mira before her, for the sky: Vela, the Sails, a constellation in the southern heavens, which is a fair name for the daughter of a woman leaving on a starship.
The film shows her first with her nose against the glass case where old HELIX-R1 rests, wide-eyed at a robot that carried her ancestor through a greenhouse three hundred years ago. At home the little toy rocket sits on a shelf above her bed while her mother tucks her in. On the spaceport plain, when Kaia kneels to hug her tight, Vela gives her the rocket, and the heirloom that R1 printed for a newborn goes onto the bridge of the ship named for that newborn.
She watches the shuttle climb holding her grandmother's hand, and that night on the hills, among the crowds, she points up at the new star crossing the sky. The album ends with the first crew's descendants looking up, and Vela is the one doing the looking.
