The United States insists it will pull out of the station at the end of 2015 while Russia wants its life prolonged, said European Space Agency (ESA) chief Jean-Jacques Dordain at an astronautics congress in Hyderabad, southern India.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin has told space station partners that the US agency has no plans for "utilisation and exploitation" of the science research lab for more than five years after it is completed, Dordain said.

"ESA is not prepared to pay NASA's share when NASA has left the space station," Dordain told reporters Tuesday night on the sidelines of the space summit.

"If NASA is staying, we are ready to follow," he added. "If NASA is quitting, I shall not propose to ESA to pay part of the cost that NASA is covering today."

That may well limit the station's life to the five years the partners agreed to keep it running after it is fully operational although both Russia and Europe see a need to prolong it beyond 2015 to conduct more scientific experiments.

NASA, which argues that the time has come to look beyond the station to other platforms including a base on the moon, foots most of the bill for the orbital platform.

The US space agency has projected its own annual bill for the project to reach 2.3 billion dollars by 2010.

"Europe considers five years to be too little for the money and effort that would have gone into the space station," said Michael Taverna, European editor at the industry publication Aviation and Space Technology.

"It would like the life of the station to be extended as long as possible," he said.

But ESA would not be able to afford the cost of upkeep for the project, given that the US space agency picks up as much as 70 percent of the tab, Taverna added.

The project, a joint venture between the US, Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada, is being assembled at an altitude reaching up to 350 kilometres (215 miles) above the surface of the earth.

The venture is the result of a post-Cold War merger of the US space station Freedom and other planned orbital platforms including Russia's Mir 2 and Europe's Colombus.

The station has been inhabited since the first crew entered it in November 2000, providing a permanent human presence in space, and was visited by the first space tourists as well as astronauts.

The ISS, as the project is known, provides a platform for scientists on earth to perform experiments on the effect of a prolonged stay in space.

The research is key to future interplanetary travel including round-trip manned missions to the moon and Mars.

The argument over the space station's longevity stems from differing perspectives.

Europe and Russia see it as essentially an orbital science lab but the US views it as a platform for space exploration which would have outlived its utility by 2015.

President George W. Bush has spelled out plans for Americans to return to the moon by 2020 if not earlier, and NASA's Griffin said here this week that the agency is aiming for a Mars landing by 2037.

"The crew on the space station acts as the eyes and hands of the scientists operating on earth," said ESA spokesman Franco Bonacina.

"We hope it can continue for a while longer," he said. "The idea is to see what we can do to satisfy the needs of the international community of scientists (to perform research) in low-earth orbit."

ESA's Dordain confirmed that plans remain on track for NASA to launch the Colombus laboratory, Europe's single biggest contribution to the space station, on December 6.

Columbus, built to last 10 years and enabling thousands of experiments to be conducted, will be joined by one French and one German astronaut, Bonacina said.

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