A Russian Soyuz spaceship docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, bringing the world's first female space tourist and a two-man crew to the orbiting outpost, the Mission Control near Moscow said.

Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Iranian-born American Anousheh Ansari blasted off aboard the Soyuz TMA-9 vessel on Monday from the barren steppes of Kazakhstan and hurtled two days in space to catch up with the station.

The Soyuz capsule hooked up with the ISS at 9:21 a.m. Moscow time (0521 GMT), according to the Mission Control.

The Soyuz crewmembers were preparing to open the hatches between the station and the capsule and will enter the station in three to four hours.

Ansari, 40, who runs a telecommunications company in Texas, will conduct a series of blood and muscular experiments for the European Space Agency during her eight-day stay on the orbiting outpost. Previous space tourists reportedly paid about 20 million U.S. dollars apiece for a ride aboard the Soyuz.

Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria will replace Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who have been working on the space station since April. Ansari will return to Earth on Sept. 29 with Vinogradov and Williams.

To make room for the arrival of the Soyuz, U.S. space shuttle Atlantis undocked from the ISS on Sunday after astronauts finished a busy week of construction work of the orbiting outpost.

Atlantis' mission is the first of a series of shuttle missions that will perform on-orbit construction of the half-finished space station, which depends on U.S. shuttles to ferry large equipment.

Russia's manned Soyuz ships and Progress supply ships had been the workhorse for the ISS during the long shutdown of the U.S. shuttle fleet, ferrying crews and supplies to keep the station ticking over for more than two years.

U.S. space agency NASA grounded the shuttle fleet following the Columbia shuttle disaster, which killed seven astronauts onboard in February 2003. After costly safety upgrades, NASA resumed shuttle flight in 2005.

Source: Xinhua