Lena Vasquez is the first person to set foot on Mars, and the album spends six tracks getting her there. She commands the four-person HELIX crew with a kind of quiet that the others lean on: she is the one who wakes before the alarm, who notices when the ship changes, who kneels when everyone else is standing.
She says goodbye to Earth alone, on wet grass at the edge of the launch perimeter, with a folded family photograph pressed to her chest. The photograph comes with her to the Ares and to the viewport where Earth is a blue dot. On Mars it is replaced by another: a picture of Earth pinned above her bunk, and later the picture of the four of them at the first meal, which outlasts them all.
Her palm is the album's refrain. She presses it into the earth before launch, against the glass of the Ares, against the glass with Mars behind it, and finally, on Sol 1, into the red soil beside the first bootprint. Twenty light-minutes away, Director Sarah Chen answers it with her own hand on a screen.
When Nova is born in a dust storm, Lena is the doctor, because she has to be. She writes SOL 1 on the first page of a journal. The bronze statue in Track 10 has her face.
