The tenth docking to the ISS was completed manually to loud cheers of relief at the Korolyov space center on the outskirts of Moscow as the Soyuz TMA-5 craft carrying Russian cosmonauts Salizhan Sharipov and Yuri Shargin and US astronaut Leroy Chiao lodged on to the mother ship.

Several hours later they broke the hermetic seals and floated on board into the arms of the crew they have come to replace - Russia's Gennady Padalka and American Michael Fincke who have been living aboard the ISS since April.

They exchanged jokes about the two veterans' hair growing too long during their six-month stay on board, and tried to put aside the dodgy docking moment in another chapter of the decades-long quest to cast a permanent anchor out in space.

Sharipov and Chiao will stay on for another 180 days to carry out experiments and keep the increasingly controversial space station operational while Shargin is scheduled to accompany the departing crew back to Earth on October 24.

US and Russian officials broke with tradition by sending up a crew that had never before tested the reliable but ancient Soviet-era Soyuz craft.

Earlier missions to the ISS were delivered by US shuttles, which have been grounded since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

All crews traveling to and from the ISS do so at present aboard Russian vessels as the US space shuttle fleet remains grounded following the disintegration on reentry of the shuttle Columbia in February 2003.

The Soyuz rumbled off according to plan from the dust bowl of the Baikonur space base that Russia is renting from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, and successfully entered orbit 10 minutes later.

It then spent two days delicately gliding through space as it tried to latch on to the ISS at just the right angle, relying on ground control-based equipment.

But the Russian cosmonaut on board noticed that the ISS, when it was in full view on his screen, was growing far too big, far too fast.

"The craft was approaching the station, but unfortunately at a distance of about 200 meters (yards), the craft began to accelerate, and our computer screens began to signal that the situation was turning dangerous," said Vladimir Solovyov, head of mission control on the Russian space center.

"At that point we decided to switch to manual control.

"In my view, the crew did a brilliant job. Salizhan (Sharipov) immediately put on the brakes. The two craft even began to move away from each other.

"And then we sort of just hung there - we had wait for a while for the sun to rise to that there would be light, and from there we had a comfortable manual docking operation."

The new ISS crew will conduct 41 scientific, medical, biological and technical experiments, including one focusing on research for a vaccination against the virus that causes AIDS, space officials said.

The new two-man crew, who have trained together for the past several months at the Star City facility outside Moscow, are also scheduled to make two space walks, one in December and one in February, while aboard the ISS.

Those space walks are to be used for preparing the ISS for the planned docking next year of the new European ATV space cargo vessel.

Chiao and Sharipov will be the 10th long-term crew aboard the ISS since the launch of its first module on November 20, 1998.

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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