The crew had traveled some 40 light years to reach this distinct set of five planets. The planets were surrounding the sun-like star they had admired since their time as amateur astronomers in their childhood. There was the one planet deemed “super-earth” and four other gas giants, one of which possessed a habitable zone and has temperatures similar to earth. This was no ordinary star and these were no ordinary astronauts. 
The star is quite visible to the naked eye in our own night sky from Earth, situated in the dimmest of all of the constellations – Cancer. These intrepid explorers bore the somewhat predictable insignia of the “crab” on their arm patches and either in some twist of fate or some not-so-private administrative joke they “coincidentally” each shared a birthday between June 22nd and July 22nd.

Like all good people born under the sign of Cancer, the team had grown very attached to one another. There were five crew members, all with extensive military training, each selected for their distinct set of skills:

– Commander Tom “Cappy” Miller, a tenacious and highly imaginative team leader, he was charged with overall mission success and the safety of crew as they set to explore this bold new planet

– Pilot Matilda “Fly Girl” Ryan, a bit more sympathetic and silent type who was responsible for the obvious operating of the shuttle and deploying the use unmanned vehicles plus an additional responsibility for the on-planet science experiments

– Mission Specialist Tom “No Nicknames” Horvath, the pessimistic and pointed engineering lead in coordinating system operations

– Mission Specialist Dr. Barry “Doc Jack” Jackson, the highly persuasive physician focused on crew health, activity planning and usage of consumable resources on board for the duration of the space flight and on planet 

– Payload Specialist Edward “Smarts” Reiben, the deeply intuitive and somewhat insecure scientist that was already carrying out many of the experimental tests on the various payload (cargo)

These space sailors or star fliers had shown intense endurance and stamina coming the longest way any humans had ever traveled in space. Their reward would be to be the first to step foot on a planet twice the size of earth that maintained a surface that past rovers had determined was covered in graphite and up to one-third was covered in diamonds. As much as Horvath wasn’t too convinced that he required a nickname, he was even less convinced of the idea that diamonds lined the surface, citing the planet as the “rhinestone cowboy” planet. This wasn’t this crew’s first rodeo together and several had worked closely together on other missions. The core group here had known each other for over 16 years and were loyal and sympathetic to each other to an extreme. Fly Girl and Smarts were still the new kids on this crew and they had experienced flight training, survival training and basic mission testing at Johnson Space Center together in Texas. 

As they approached this “super-earth” planet 55 Cancri e, the shuttle monitors assessed the surface temperature at well past 3900 degrees Fahrenheit. As Doc Jack daydreamed of his island retirement home off the coast of South Florida that was awaiting him back on our Earth, he had recalled that at the press conference at Yale where the researchers had noted that the planet was likely “unusually dense”. He continued to wonder what they had meant by this as he took a small bite into his “dense” slice of his birthday cake the crew had surprised him with the night prior.

Cappy and Fly Girl were at the controls bringing the shuttle near to the surface for landing when surface life scan monitors began to go off the charts. Cappy initially thought it had been just a electromagnetic field issue and quickly dismissed the warning. The soft landing was the signature move for Fly Girl and some claimed she was more rough in putting butter on toast. 

The crew were preparing to disembark as they heard a loud rumbling. The disconcerting reverberation resembled a rolling thunder but had a distinctive, more thumping or pounding-type tone to it. As Horvath opened the shuttle doors for the rest of the crew, Cappy led the way for the team, donning the first suit capable of protecting human life in such extreme heat. He was unanimously chosen to be the first to take this next “giant leap”. As the first to exit, he was the first to see and confirm that the surface was indeed this mysterious graphite and yes, dazzling diamond combination but that wasn’t the only amazing initial sight for the crew.

They were greeted this day, June 29, by diamond studded rocky creatures partially resembling the giant rock characters depicted in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah that Russell Crowe starred in back in 2014. While there are no actual giant rock creatures illustrated in the written biblical account of Noah, Genesis 6:1–4 does tell the readers of the Nephilim. The term which means “fallen ones” when translated into English, the Nephilim were the product of copulation between the divine beings and human women. The book goes on to describe that “The Nephilim were on earth in those days – and also afterward.” Were these strange rock giant inhabitants of the planet 55 Cancri e actually the Nephilim? 

They initially appeared even far more humanoid and nimble like the Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four rock solid character “The Thing” – Benjamin “Ben” Grimm. Were they the fallen angels described as “The Watchers” we read about in the Book of Enoch (an apocryphal collection of texts, the earliest dating to the third century B.C.E.)?

Cappy and the intrepid “Crab” crew of shuttle mission 2744 landing on what was now confirmed by Horvath as “clearly not the rhinestone cowboy planet” was just at the beginning of their adventure of exploration. Their first goal was to uncover how to communicate to these inhabitants and establish their shared values as a compass to guide their interactions and next steps together – this would be critical to their mission success.