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Helen wanted to give her father the curve of the Earth . For years he had sat at the kitchen table with launches on a small screen , naming the companies as if they were teams : SpaceX , Blue Origin , Virgin Galactic . She wanted him in a seat , not on that chair . The page she trusted described a suborbital flight of the kind Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had offered to private passengers . Up , a few minutes of weightlessness , the Earth huge in the window , then down . Not an orbit . Farther down , the same page separated SpaceX from those two : private passengers carried into orbit , a longer journey that circles before it returns . She was not buying that . She was trying to buy the few minutes . She found the price and did not say it aloud . It was not a sum she could move from her account to a booking . She searched for her father's knee , his age , a strap , a step , any line that would tell her if he would be turned away . The page spoke of risk , of consent , and of the country that licenses the launch . Lower still she found the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 . She read until the point was plain . It speaks to states . They answer for space activity carried out under them , companies included . No country owns the Moon . It did not mention her father , and it did not say whether he could take the seat . She called him with the tab still open . A photograph of the curve sat above the minutes , as if the minutes were a place you could reserve . He asked which company . She did not name one . He would hear it if she blurred a few minutes with an orbit , and she did not want the call to become a lesson . She said she was choosing a gift : those few minutes off the Earth . He was quiet long enough that she thought the call had failed . Then he asked her to come on Thursday , when a launch would be on the public stream , and to bring nothing . He had already seen the planet through other people's windows . He wanted the chair beside his . She closed the price without saving it . The few minutes stayed on the screen until the screen went dark . Thursday was the sofa . It was the only gift he had asked for .
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