As a spacecraft carrying two Russian cosmonauts successfully docked with Mir, a consortium set up to extend the ageing station's life said it signed a deal providing private funds for a second manned flight to Mir this year.

"Our investors reaffirmed their commitment to Mir's commercialisation with a substantial amount of money for the second round of financing," said Jeffrey Manber, head of the MirCorp consortium tasked with financing Mir.

"This commitment will allow the new mission later this year which will include establishing the first ever Internet portal in space," he added, saying the new flight was scheduled in September.

MirCorp did not reveal how much money was being pumped in, but the price tag for keeping Mir afloat for a year is 100 million dollars (104 million euros).

"We have built successful internet companies in Europe and Japan that have a valuation in the billions of dollars," said Chirinjeev Kathuria, MirCorp investor.

"And we feel our first ever Internet space portal on Mir will have a high value as well," he added. A portal is a website which offers access to the rest of the web, such as those provided by Yahoo! or AltaVista.

MirCorp's number two Andrew Eddy said a Mir website with news from Mir, reports by cosmonauts and a three-dimensional tour of the space station would be developed.

"That will allow us to bring space closer to Earth," he told AFP.

Eddy said the company was also "in negotiations with four clients, American and European," who would each pay some 30 million dollars to spend a week on Mir in the first ever case of "space tourism."

Mir's Russian operator, Energiya, set up the MirCorp consortium with the US venture capital outfit Gold and Appel, who found the 20 million dollars which paid for the current flight.

Mir had been due to come down to Earth this summer because Russia's cash-strapped space programme was unable to fund both Mir and its share of work on the multi-billion dollar International Space Station.

Construction of the massive project has already been delayed because of Moscow's financial problems.

The Soyuz TM-30 space craft carrying two Russian astronauts on the first privately-financed mission to the 14-year-old orbiter, docked at 0531 GMT, officials at ground control at Korolyev near Moscow said.

Zalyotin and Kaleri entered the space station at 12.13 p.m. Moscow time (0813 GMT). Space officials said the cosmonauts hoped within two weeks to locate the holes in Mir through which oxygen is slowly leaking.

The cosmonauts are due to conduct a space walk and a number of scientific experiments.

The pride of the Soviet space programme launched in 1986, Mir's Russian operator says it is still capable of functioning for two or three more years.

Cash-raising projects to date have included shooting a movie in space, although contractual haggling spiked a US-Russian bid to shoot "The Last Voyage" aboard Mir for 206 million dollars.

The reconversion is a remarkable development in Mir's chequered career, marked by a string of incidents in 1997 including an onboard fire and a near-fatal collision with a cargo craft.

Its main computer shut down at least four times, leaving its occupants spinning through space in total darkness.

Space officials said they would know by early May if it is feasible to extend the career of the mothballed station.

"By late April to early May we will be able to see if, from a technical point of view, it is possible to continue to use Mir," an official from the Russian space training centre, Yury Kargapolov, told AFP.

"To evaluate Mir's prospects, we need to wait for the docking of a cargo vessel due to arrive in the second part of April," he added.

Copyright 1999 AFP. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by AFP and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.