American Edward Michael Fincke, Dutchman Andre Kuipers and Russia's Gennady Padalka, who had blasted off two days earlier from Kazakhstan, docked at the station some 400 kilometers (250 miles) above the Earth at 9:01 Moscow time (0501 GMT).

They entered the hatch of the space station some 90 minutes later to be greeted by the two-man crew finishing their six-month mission, who offered them bread and salt according to Russian tradition.

"The hatch has just opened. I can see Kuipers who entered the station first, with a big smile," mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin told AFP.

"Fincke followed him, then Padalka," he added, relating images broadcast to the TsUP mission control centre in Korolyov, outside Moscow.

Fincke, who was making his first journey to space, and Padalka will replace US astronaut Michael Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kalery, who have been there since last October.

Kuipers, making his maiden space voyage on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA), will stay at the ISS for nine days before returning to Earth with Foale and Kalery on April 30.

Padalka, 45, and 37-year-old Fincke will perform two space walks in June and August to install equipment necessary for the Jules Verne, a European-built new automated transfer vehicle, which is due to arrive at the station in April 2005.

They will stay on the ISS for six months.

Kuipers is to carry out 21 experiments, including studying the effect of weightlessness on blood pressure and heartbeat, as part of the "Delta" project -- the Dutch Expedition for Life science, Technology and Atmospheric research.

Ever since the Columbia shuttle disaster last year, Russia's Soyuz rockets are the only way astronauts and equipment get to and from the ISS, a 16-nation project that includes Canada, ESA, Japan, Russia and the United States.

The current Soyuz mission is the third to the ISS since the United States froze shuttle missions after Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry in February

NASA associate administrator Frederick Gregory, who was present at mission control for the docking, said that US shuttle flights should resume in March

Reinforcing a dispute between the Russian and US space partners, he reiterated NASA's refusal to extend the duration of manned missions to the ISS from six months to a year.

"We are not yet ready for such flights," he was quoted as saying by the ITAR-TASS news agency.

But Russian space officials insisted their proposal must be accepted. "We are ready technically for that. Our American partners must listen to us," Yury Semyonov, director of the Energiya space construction company, said.

At the end of March, Russia's Space Agency told NASA that it favored extending the missions at the ISS to one year partly to help supplement its cash-strapped coffers.

While the Russian space programme normally supplements its income by flying European astronauts and space tourists to the ISS, it now has much fewer opportunities to take them on board its Soyuz vessels.

All rights reserved. � 2004 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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