HOUSTON - Space shuttle Endeavour arrived at the international space station on Friday, bringing the newest crew to inhabit the orbiting outpost while they change the Canadian-built space arm. The two spacecraft linked as they sailed 385 kilometres above the South Pacific.

"Got a real nice view of you," shuttle commander Kenneth Cockrell told the station crew as he guided Endeavour in for the docking. "We've got three transfer line items sitting here on the flight deck with me, raring to go," he added, referring to the station's next three residents.

Endeavour, which launched Wednesday, is delivering two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut who will call Alpha home for 41/2 months.

While Endeavour is docked to Alpha for eight days, shuttle astronauts Franklin Chang-Diaz and Philippe Perrin will perform three spacewalks to repair the space station robot arm's wrist and install a Canadian-made base weighing 1,400 kilograms that will let the robot arm traverse the outpost.

The base, which will function much like an Earth-bound railway, is part of the space station's mobile servicing system, developed and built by MD Robotics of Brampton, Ont.

It contains four power sockets for Canadarm2. It will sit on a transporter - imagine a flatbed rail car - and slide across the outside of the space station on a track. When it's complete, the mobile base system will be a work platform used to transport large structures or experiments on the outside of the space station.

The Canadarm2, installed by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield last year, requires wrist surgery because of a problem that caused one of its joints to seize. Engineers have managed to work around the problem but want to fix it before the arm is needed for major construction later this year.

Friday marked the 184th day in orbit for the space station residents. When Bursch and Walz return to Earth aboard Endeavour on June 17, they will have spent 194 days aloft, surpassing the current U.S. record of 188 days.

Alpha's crew was set to return in mid-May, but the addition of the robot-arm repair job delayed Endeavour's flight by a month.