Spacex Dragon creates history, docks with ISS

delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA on Sunday, following up a historic liftoff with an equally smooth docking in yet another first for Elon Musk’s company.

With test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken poised to take over manual control if necessary, the Spacex Dragon capsule pulled up to the station and docked automatically, no assistance needed. The linkup occurred 422 kilometres above the China-mongolia border.

It was the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft carried astronauts to the orbiting lab in its nearly 20 years. NASA considers this the opening volley in a business revolution encircling Earth and eventually stretching to the moon and Mars. “Bravo on a magnificent moment in spaceflight history,” NASA’S Mission Control radioed to everyone from Houston.

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy greeted the incoming crew by ringing the ship’s bell aboard the space station.

The docking occurred a little early, barely 19 hours after a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Saturday afternoon from Kennedy Space Center, the nation’s first astronaut launch to orbit from home soil in nearly a decade.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, thousands jammed surrounding beaches, bridges and towns to watch as Spacex became the world’s first private company to send astronauts into orbit, and ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA. NASA has yet to decide how long Hurley and Behnken will spend at the space station, somewhere between one and four months. While they’re there, the Dragon test pilots will join NASA’S Cassidy and two Russian station residents in performing experiments and possibly spacewalks to install fresh station batteries. .

President Donald Trump on Saturday called for expanding the G-7, which he described as a “very outdated group”, to include India, Australia, South Korea and Russia, suggesting it could be called the “G-10 or G-11”. He also said he is postponing its next meet, which the US is hosting, to September or November,.

“I’m postponing it because I don’t feel that as a G7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on the way back from the historic launch of the first manned mission into space by a private company, Spacex. “It’s a very outdated group of countries.”

“We want Australia, we want India, we want South Korea. And what do we have? That’s a nice group of countries right there,” he said, skipping Russia. But he appeared to have suggested inviting Russia as well, according to a report from a pool of reporters that traveled with him.

The president went on to describe the expanded group as the “G-10 or G-11”, and added, he had “roughly” discussed the idea with the leaders of the four countries he’d like to add.

The Group of Seven, as the G-7 expands to, is an intergovernmental organization of some of the world’s largest economies, the United States, the United

Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. India is a member of the larger version of the body that is called the G-20.

An aide to the president said the plan is to bring together all traditional allies to discuss how to deal with the future of China.

Trump has called before for Russia to be readmitted to the group, arguing, as he did before the 2019 summit in Biarritz, “because a lot of the things we talk about have to do with Russia”. But this is probably the first time any of the G-7 member countries has called for including India or the other three named by Trump.

The US president had pressed the G-7 heads of state and government at a dinner during the Biarritz summit to readmit Russia.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had attended the Biarritz at the invitation of the host, French President Emmanuel Macro. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had attended a meeting of the body in Gleneagles, Scotland in 2005 at the invitation of then British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The group was then called the G-8 with Russia as the eighth member. Russia was expelled by the group in 2014 for annexing Crimea.

There was no clarity on the timing of the summit though.