KOROLYOV, Oct 16: A rookie crew of two Russians and an American had a few scary moments on Saturday as their craft approached too quickly to the International Space Station for docking before they put on the brakes in time to avoid a crash.

The tenth docking to the ISS was completed manually to loud cheers of relief at the Korolyov space centre, 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 Oct 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.-AFP