The European Space Agency (ESA) said the robot truck had outperformed every expectation, while the aerospace firm which built it urged Europe to back a blueprint for transforming the ship into a manned spacecraft.

The Jules Verne, as ESA's first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) was called, was sent plummeting to Earth after more than six months in space.

After two operations that dispatched it on a suicidally steep final trajectory, the ATV entered the atmosphere at a height of 120 kilometers (75 miles).

"It broke up at an altitude of 75 kms (46.8 miles) with the remaining fragments falling into the Pacific some 12 minutes later," ESA said in a press release.

At mission control in Toulouse, southwestern France, engineers held up signs emblazoned with the words "Bye Bye Jules" as the 1.3-billion-euro (1.885-billion-dollar) craft expired in a meteor-like streak.

ESA had earmarked a splashdown zone for potential debris in a remote zone east of New Zealand, west of Chile and south of the Easter Islands.

It had asked national and international bodies to tell ships and aircraft to avoid the area during the re-entry phase.

Around a hundred parts of the 13.5-tonne ATV could survive the fiery heat and stress of re-entry and splash down in the area, the agency said last week.

Measuring 10 metres (32.5 feet) in length and with nearly the volume of a large shipping container, the robot craft was launched on March 9 on a one-way trip.

It docked automatically with the ISS on April 3, bringing 7.5 tonnes of equipment, water and air to its three-men crew, and carried out several boosts, using its onboard engines, to take the station away from the clutch of atmospheric drag.

The ATV helped the ISS perform a collision-avoidance manoeuvre, when fragments of an old satellite came close to the station.

As a pressurised module, it also served as much-appreciated extra room aboard the cramped station. The ATV was filled up with the ISS's trash before detaching on September 6.

The Jules Verne will be followed by four more cargo ships, whose assembly and launch will each cost over 300 million euros (435 million dollars). The next ATV mission is planned for 2010.

The ATV's success has spurred thinking within ESA that the spacecraft could be modified to carry humans.

The scheme would help the ISS during a transport crunch, likely to last four or five years, between the phaseout of the US space shuttle in 2010 and its planned successor, the Aries-Orion rocket-plus-capsule system.

During this time, the only transporter to and from the orbital outpost will be Russia's veteran Soyuz.

ESA ministers will hold their first discussion of the idea when they meet in the Netherlands on November 25-26.

Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA's director of human spaceflight, on Monday described the flight of the Jules Verne as a "fantastic accomplishment."

"Europe has now taken a further step towards its capability of being able to transport and return cargo and astronauts to and from space," she said.

Astrium, a subsidiary of the European aerospace giant EADS, referred to its two-phase plan, called ATV Evolution, that would firstly turn ATV into a vehicle to return scientific samples and other freight back to Earth, and secondly into a manned craft.

The mission of the Jules Verne "is only a first step," said Astrium boss Francois Auque in a press release.

"Europe must now take the necessary decisions to prepare for the future of space transport and human exploration of space and strengthen its position as a great space power."

Transforming the ATV into a crew vehicle will require adding a heat shield and other major modifications, and carry substantial costs as the system will have to undergo numerous tests.

It could add to budget strains within ESA and sharpen arguments about the costs of human flight when compared to the value of robot science-gathering spacecraft, analysts said.

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