Cosmonauts Sergei Zalyotin and Alexander Kaleri, aboard Mir, were opening the hatches to attach the Progress M1-2 cargo ship, launched from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome two days earlier, Itar-Tass said.

The cargo, weighing over two and a half tonnes, includes fuel, food, water, oxygen reserves and sundry equipment for the two Russians on board.

Zalyotin and Kaleri, who have been in orbit for almost three weeks, are on the world's first privately financed mission to space.

The 14-year-old Mir is leaking air and had been unmanned since last August when the last officially funded mission ended.

The current cosmonauts' tasks include plugging the holes through which air is slowly leaking and pumping in fresh oxygen supplies.

"Today's mission was fully backed by MirCorp and its majority shareholder RS Energia. No government funds were used," said Jeffrey Manber, president of MirCorp, in a statement from the Holland-based private company that holds the exclusive lease for the Russian-built and owned station.

Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, a MirCorp director and investor said financing had been completed for another manned flight later in the year.

"We will soon be bringing aerospace and media companies into MirCorp as partners," Kathuria said in the statement.

Manber said MirCorp's short-term revenue would be generated from non-traditional uses of the space station, including media and entertainment packages.

However, on Wednesday, Russian Space Agency director Yury Koptev said he was skeptical of MirCorp's plans to use Mir as a "space tourist" destination, allowing a privileged few to spend a week in orbit at a price of 30 million dollars (32 million euros).

Agency spokesman Sergei Gorbunov also expressed doubt about the tourism initiative.

"I strongly doubt that there will be volunteers to go into space for 30 million dollars. Mir is not a luxury hotel, living conditions are difficult there," Gorbunov said.

The United States has already rejected plans to promote space tourism.

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

Mir was the pride of the Soviet space programme when it was launched in 1986, but has been plagued by technical problems. Mir's Russian operator Energia, however, says it is capable of functioning for two or three more years.

The last cosmonauts to have lived on Mir were two Russians, Viktor Afanassiyev and Sergei Avdiyev, and the French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haignere, who ended their mission last August.

MirCorp is 60 percent owned by RSC Energia. The remaining 40 percent comes from private investors.

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

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