Cape Canaveral, June 26 (AP): If all goes as planned, part of the international space station will host research experiments from outsiders after it is completed in three years, NASA officials said.

NASA is in talks with several government agencies, most notably the National Institutes of Health, and private businesses that want to conduct research in the microgravity laboratory orbiting 354 kilometres above Earth.

NASA and its 15 partner nations, including Russia,Canada, Japan and European countries, plan to finish construction of the space station in 2010, when the US space shuttles are grounded and NASA focuses its manned spaceflight programme on returning to the moon in an Orion spacecraft.

For the past two years, much of the science at the space station has been oriented toward returning astronauts to the moon, and even going on to Mars.

"We didn't need the entire capacity of the space station to do exploration-related research," said Mark Uhran, NASA's assistant associate administrator of the space station yesterday. "So the capacity that was freed up after we restructured our program is now available to other agencies or private sector companies."

The space station's first section was launched in 1998 and it has been inhabited continuously since 2000 by Russian, US and European crew mates. By 2009, the station's three- member crew is expected to grow to six people.

The station was designed to last until at least 2015, but managers now believe it could operate as late as 2022.