"The technical fault happened in a section of the craft's control system which was used before in the old Soyuz," said Nikolai Zelenshchikov, number two at RKK Energiya, which builds Soyuz spacecraft, and head of an inquiry into the botched landing.

The system which controls the landing of the craft "has been in use for 25 years" and the fault "should not repeat itself" during next flights, the official told AFP.

"The new Soyuz functioned very well," he said.

Russian space agency Rosaviakosmos spokesman Sergei Gorbunov for his part said "there is no need to halt the production of the modernized Soyuz-TMA."

The officials were attending a ceremony at the Star City astronaut training centre outside Moscow to welcome back to Earth the sixth resident crew from the International Space Station.

The Soyuz rocket was carrying two US astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut when it made an uncontrolled entry on May 4, landing nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) off target in Kazakhstan after the malfunction forced the team to abort an automatic landing.

The flight from the ISS marked the first landing on a Russian-made craft since the United States grounded its space fleet in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster on February 1.

It was also the first time the new Soyuz TMA-1 craft, which made its maiden manned voyage to space last October, had made a landing.